What makes a historical personage a hero? All too often, we reach for figures from the past and then paint them in cartoonish, unrealistic colors. George Washington never lied; he won every battle; and he led our young nation as if directed by the hand of the Deity. Abraham Lincoln was completely free from the racist beliefs that saturated his world and morally faultless to boot. Harriet Tubman saved hundreds of the enslaved without displaying any human faults or features.

Such caricatures do a disservice to understanding the very real, very human people who have shaped our past. As a historian and educator, I try to get my students to see the past in all its messiness and contradictions. After all, we cannot learn lessons from people who did not exist.

In the case of Harriet Tubman, the public is missing a key aspect that makes her a much more interesting, and relatable, human being. This is her disability.

We’ve historically stigmatized disability in America. We mistakenly view disabled people as flawed, as “less than.” In pop culture, all too often disability is deployed as a mark of villainy. Think of Captain Hook’s missing hand or Darth Vader’s multiple limb loss. The stigma carries on into real........

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