History is Awesome!

Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II by Susan Burch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If you are seeking a good introductory text to US Deaf Cultural History, this is an excellent book to start with.

Burch divides the topic into five sections: Deaf Residential Schools (and the fight against the Oralist movement), The Preservation of Sign Language, Deaf Associations (which included Deaf sports stars), Deaf people in the working world, and Legal Challenges, which focuses both on eugenics and Deaf people's rights to citizenship.

Burch manages to lay out discussions of citizenship, Americanization, and cultural conflict in a way that I found engaging as an historian familiar with the literature, and that I think the average reader of US history will also find easy to follow and interesting.

One of the things I really like about what Burch has done here is that she draws primarily on sources written by Deaf people, such as the Deaf press (primarily The Silent Worker and The Frat) and annual reports from Deaf societies, rather than the work of hearing educators.

Burch also makes a point of highlighting fractures in the Deaf community. She brings up issues of sexism, racism, and class conflict between university educated "elites" and "working men". She also discusses the divide between people who became deaf later in life, and people who were either born deaf or became deaf quiet young. These are all especially highlighted during her discussion of eugenics, as deaf elites approved of "discouraging" congenitally deaf couples from marrying and having children, since this was less likely to affect members of their own group, who were primarily deafened later in childhood.

Overall, I really liked this book. Part of Burch's conclusion left me irritated - I would like to move to the world where every Deaf university student actually *gets* a 'terp rather than having to wait forever, even with the ADA - but other than that I think her research is spot-on, her prose is very engaging, and her work is awesome. I recommend this to everyone.

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This review abused the word "However". My editors and thesis adviser despair regularly over my abuse of "However".

Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America by Mary Klages


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was not what I expected when I picked it up, and I strongly suspect I was not the intended audience. It is primarily about literature, and I am an historian, so I struggle a great deal with the early chapters, and never quite got into the later ones as a result.That said, I think this book would be outstanding for people who are interested in ways people with disabilities are presented in literature.

Klages analyses a variety of textual sources, varying from Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop" to Gibson's "The Miracle Worker", from Cumming's "The Lamp Lighter" to Annual Reports from the Perkins Institute for the Blind and various autobiographical works by blind women, most notably Helen Keller.

I had difficulties with some of Klages' jargon, likely because we come from different disciplines. However, I also had problems with repetition throughout the book: How many times do we need to be reminded what is meant by "poster" in the sense of "poster child"? How many times does she need to repeat Howe's assertion that all blind people need "a comfortable home!", complete with exclamation mark? Combined with the lack of concluding chapter, I was left with the impression that I was reading a series of loosely-connected journal articles, rather than book.

However, I admit that Klages presented many interesting and informative ideas that I do plan to apply to my own work. I especially appreciated her discussion of the language of Annual Reports from Institutions for the Blind in Nineteenth Century US, because it helps situate the Annual Reports I'm reading in the broader literature at the time. I would recommend chapters of this book to historians, and likely the whole book to literary scholars, but not as an intro-book to issues around disability and representation.