Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture

by R. A. R. Edwards

Overview

During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations.

Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814724026
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2012
Series:	The History of Disability , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	263
Sales rank:	136,322
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Normal
0






MicrosoftInternetExplorer4



/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0pt 5.4pt 0pt 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0pt;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}



R. A. R. Edwards is Associate
Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester,
New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction

1 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc:

A Yale Man and a Deaf Man Open a School and Create a World

2 Manual Education: An American Beginning

3 Learning to Be Deaf: Lessons from the Residential School 

4 The Deaf Way: Living a Deaf Life 

5 Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe: 

The First American Oralists

6 Languages of Signs: Methodical versus Natural 

7 The Fight over the Clarke School: 

Manualists and Oralists Confront Deafness

Conclusion 

Notes 

Index 

About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this gracefully written book, Edwards offers both a fascinating narrative and a provocative, revisionist thesis. Scholars and general readers interested in the Deaf community and American cultural history will find it a rewarding read.”-Douglas Baynton,University of Iowa

Editorial Reviews

"R.A.R. Edwards' Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture is a brilliant study of the emergence of a deaf community in nineteenth-century America . . . . Beyond a more nuanced account of the emergence of the American Deaf community, this monograph is ultimately a revisionist history of the ongoing conflict over pedagogical methods in deaf education. Building on the established historiography produced by a small cadre of deaf historians, Edwards represents a new generation of scholarship in the field, offering a revisionist thesis of the ideas originally presented by Van Cleve and Crouch over twenty years ago. Words Made Flesh is a fine addition to New York University press's history of disability series."

Common-Place

"Words Made Fleshis a stimulating, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging book."

James W. Trentn Studies

"[This book is] provocative, detailed, and a welcome examination of the emergence of a signing deaf culture."

American Historical Review

"[A] useful addition to the still-developing history of the nation's evolving deaf community."

The Journal of American History

"In this gracefully written book, Edwards offers both a fascinating narrative and a provocative, revisionist thesis.Scholars and general readers interested in the Deaf community and American cultural history will find it a rewarding read."

Douglas Baynton

"Words Made Fleshis a stimulating, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging book."

American Studies - James W. Trent

In this gracefully written book, Edwards offers both a fascinating narrative and a provocative, revisionist thesis. Scholars and general readers interested in the Deaf community and American cultural history will find it a rewarding read.”-Douglas Baynton,University of Iowa

"[This book is] provocative, detailed, and a welcome examination of the emergence of a signing deaf culture."- American Historical Review

"R.A.R. Edwards' Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture is a brilliant study of the emergence of a deaf community in nineteenth-century America . . . . Beyond a more nuanced account of the emergence of the American Deaf community, this monograph is ultimately a revisionist history of the ongoing conflict over pedagogical methods in deaf education. Building on the established historiography produced by a small cadre of deaf historians, Edwards represents a new generation of scholarship in the field, offering a revisionist thesis of the ideas originally presented by Van Cleve and Crouch over twenty years ago. Words Made Flesh is a fine addition to New York University press's history of disability series."- Common-Place

"[A] useful addition to the still-developing history of the nation's evolving deaf community." - The Journal of American History

" Words Made Flesh is a stimulating, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging book."-James W. Trent , American Studies

From the Publisher