Nhc Podcasts

Prior to the modern era, autobiographical narratives were primarily authored by members of elite classes of society, giving modern-day historians relatively limited insight into the ways that lower-class individuals experienced political, cultural, and economic events of their time. However, the surviving documents that constitute an exception to this rule can give us unprecedented glimpses of everyday life in earlier eras. In this podcast, Jacob M. Baum (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, outlines the insights that primary sources like the autobiographical notebook of Sebastian Fischer, a deaf sixteenth-century shoemaker, can provide for studies of early modern disability history. Fischer's manuscript not only describes what life was like during this period for an artisan with hearing impairment, but also provides a window into the way that major historical events like the Protestant Reformation were experienced by individuals who lacked economic status and politi