Description

This text explores American culture from the mid-19th century to 1920 through the lens of one episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language amongst deaf people. The debate about sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages", humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, the author found that, although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language

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Paperback / softback by Douglas C. Baynton

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This text explores American culture from the mid-19th century to 1920 through the lens of one episode: the campaign led... Read more

    Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
    Publication Date: 22/06/1998
    ISBN13: 9780226039640, 978-0226039640
    ISBN10: 0226039641

    Number of Pages: 235

    Non Fiction , History

    Description

    This text explores American culture from the mid-19th century to 1920 through the lens of one episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language amongst deaf people. The debate about sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages", humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, the author found that, although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

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