Throughout the last two centuries, a controversial question has plagued the field of education of the deaf: Should sign language be used to communicate with and instruct deaf children? Never the Twain Shall Meet focuses on the debate over this question, especially as it was waged in the 19th century, when it was at its highest pitch and the battle lines were clearly drawn. In addition to exploring Alexander Graham Bell’s and Edward Miner Gallaudet’s familial and educational backgrounds, Never the Twain Shall Meet looks at how their views of society affected their philosophies of education and how their work continues to influence the education of deaf students today.

When three deaf men in the 1960s invented and sold TTYs, the first teletypewriting devices that allowed deaf people to communicate by telephone, they started a telecommunications revolution for deaf people throughout America. A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans chronicles the history of this movement, which lagged behind new technical developments decades after the advent of TTYs. In this highly original work, Author Karen Peltz Strauss reveals how the paternalism of the hearing-oriented telecommunications industries slowed support for technology for deaf users. Throughout this comprehensive account, she emphasizes the grassroots efforts behind all of the eventual successes. A New Civil Right recounts each advance in turn, such as the pursuit of special customer premises equipment (SCPE) from telephone companies; the Telecommunications Act of 1982 and the Telecommunications Accessibility Enhancement Act of 1988 and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which required nationwide relay telephone services for deaf and hard of hearing users. Strauss painstakingly details how all of these advances occurred incrementally, first on local and state levels, and later through federal law. It took exhaustive campaigning to establish 711 for nationwide relay dialing, while universal access to television captioning required diligent legal and legislative work to pass the Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990. The same persistence resulted in the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required all off-the-shelf communications equipment, including new wireless technology, to be readily accessible to deaf users.

In graduating from Gallaudet University, finding a job in Washington, D.C., and starting a family with her college sweetheart, Kitty Fischer tacitly abandoned the Louisiana Cajun culture that had exposed her to little more than prejudice and misery as a child. Upon discovering that she suffered from Usher syndrome (a genetic condition that causes both deafness and blindness), however, Fischer began an unlikely journey toward reclaiming her heritage. She and Cathryn Carroll tell the story of her heroic struggle and cultural odyssey in Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindness. “By this time Mama knew I was ‘not right,’” Fischer says of her early childhood. “She knew the real words for ‘not right,’ too, though she never said those words. I was deaf and dumb.” Initially Fischer’s parents turned to folk healers to try and “cure” their daughter’s deafness, but an aunt’s fortunate discovery of the Louisiana School for the Deaf would rescue Fischer from misunderstanding and introduce her to sign language and Deaf culture. She weathered the school’s experiments with oralism and soon rose to the top of her class, ultimately leaving Louisiana for the academic promise of Gallaudet. While in college, Fischer met and married her future husband, Lance, a Jewish Deaf man from Brooklyn, New York, and each landed jobs close to their alma mater. After the birth of their first child, however, Fischer could no longer ignore her increasing tunnel vision. Doctors quickly confirmed that Fischer had Usher syndrome. While Fischer struggled to come to terms with her condition, the high incidence of Usher syndrome among Cajun people led her to re-examine her cultural roots. “Could I still be me, Catherine Hoffpauir Fischer, had I not been born of a mix that codes for Usher syndrome?” she asks. “To some extent, the history of my people explains the constitution of my genes and the way my life has unfolded.” Today Fischer prospers, enjoying her time with family and friends and celebrating the Deaf, Cajun, Blind, and Jewish cultures that populate her life. Her lively story will resonate with anyone who recognizes the arduous journey toward claiming an identity.

In 1976, Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman released their classic Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. In it, they featured works from the 19th and 20th centuries by well-known authors such as Charles Dickens and Eudora Welty. They also presented less-well-known deaf authors, and they prefaced each excerpt with remarks on context, societal perceptions, and the dignity due to deaf people. Since then, much has transpired, turning around the literary criticism regarding portrayals of deaf people in print. Edna Edith Sayers reflects these changes in her new collection Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. Sayers mines the same literary vein as the first volume with rich new results. Her anthology also introduces rare works by early masters such as Daniel Defoe. She includes three new deaf authors, Charlotte Elizabeth, Howard T. Hofsteater, and Douglas Bullard, who offer compelling evidence of the attitudes toward deaf people current in their eras. In search of commonalities and comparisons, Sayers reveals that the defining elements of deaf literary characters are fluid and subtly different beyond the predominant dueling stereotypes of preternaturally spiritual beings and thuggish troglodytes. Outcasts and Angels demonstrates these subtle variations in writings by Ambrose Bierce, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, and Flannery O’Connor. Stories by Juozas Grušas, Julian Barnes, and many other international authors broaden the scope of this updated inquiry into the deaf literary character. Sayer’s preface and closing essay bring any disparate parts together, completing Outcasts and Angels as a fitting, contemporary companion to the original classic collection. In 1976, Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman released their classic Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. In it, they featured works from the 19th and 20th centuries by well-known authors such as Charles Dickens and Eudora Welty. They also presented less-well-known deaf authors, and they prefaced each excerpt with remarks on context, societal perceptions, and the dignity due to deaf people. Since then, much has transpired, turning around the literary criticism regarding portrayals of deaf people in print. Edna Edith Sayers reflects these changes in her new collection Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. Sayers mines the same literary vein as the first volume with rich new results. Her anthology also introduces rare works by early masters such as Daniel Defoe. She includes three new deaf authors, Charlotte Elizabeth, Howard T. Hofsteater, and Douglas Bullard, who offer compelling evidence of the attitudes toward deaf people current in their eras. In search of commonalities and comparisons, Sayers reveals that the defining elements of deaf literary characters are fluid and subtly different beyond the predominant dueling stereotypes of preternaturally spiritual beings and thuggish troglodytes. Outcasts and Angels demonstrates these subtle variations in writings by Ambrose Bierce, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, and Flannery O’Connor. Stories by Juozas Grušas, Julian Barnes, and many other international authors broaden the scope of this updated inquiry into the deaf literary character. Sayer’s preface and closing essay bring any disparate parts together, completing Outcasts and Angels as a fitting, contemporary companion to the original classic collection.

Parallel Views provides scholars and others involved in Deaf issues a unique opportunity to examine two societies and their respective relations with their deaf citizens. In his introduction, Harlan Lane proposes that French and United States’ concepts of deafness reflect fundamental differences in that French society considers deaf people as a disability group, while the tendency in the United States is to acknowledge the existence of Deaf culture. This insightful work explores the implications of these differences in detail, relying upon the excellent scholarship presented at the 1991 conference in Paris “The Deaf in Society: Education and Access.” Organized into seven distinct parts, Parallel Views features such notable contributors as Carol Padden, Roslyn Rosen, and Robert R. Davila from the United States, and Michel Exertier, Christiane Fournier, and Guy Bouchaveau from France. This current and most useful exchange of scholarship should be in the library of everyone involved in Deaf studies or the Deaf community.

To correct the paucity of information on deaf or hard of hearing children and their parents’ experiences with early intervention services, researchers explored these relationships as part of the National Parent Project. From this investigation, Parents and Their Deaf Children details the experiences of a group of parents and their deaf children from the first identification of the latter’s hearing loss through their early years in elementary school. Renowned scholars Kathryn Meadow-Orlans, Donna Mertens, and Marilyn Sass-Lehrer reveal here for the first time the goals and expectations of the parents, the children’s achievements and troubles, and the families’ satisfaction and disappointment with health and educational systems. Parents and their Deaf Children stems from a nationwide survey of parents with six-to-seven-year-old deaf or hard of hearing children, followed up by interviews with 80 parents. The authors not only discuss the parents’ communication choices for their children, but also provide how parents’ experiences differ, especially for those whose children are hard of hearing, have additional conditions, or have cochlear implants. Also, one chapter is devoted to families from minority cultures. The final section of this distinctive study offers solid advice for other parents of deaf children and also the professionals who serve them.

In 1964, of the more than 85 million telephones in the United States and Canada, less than one percent were used regularly by deaf people. If they didn’t ask their hearing neighbors for help, they depended upon their hearing children, some as young as three years old, to act as intermediaries for business calls or medical consultations. In that same year, three enterprising deaf men, Robert H. Weitbrecht, James C. Marsters, and Andrew Saks, started the process that led to deaf people around the world having an affordable phone system that they could use. Weitbrecht, a successful physicist with the Stanford Research Institute, had been experimenting with a teletypewriter (TTY) used with shortwave radios. When Marsters, a prominent deaf orthodontist, met Weitbrecht and saw his TTY, he immediately suggested the possibility of resolving deaf people’s decades-long struggle to have access to telecommunications without relying totally upon hearing people as go-betweens. Andrew Saks brought his business acumen to the group, which soon set to work overcoming the daunting problems they faced. Harry Lang’s A Phone of Their Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell tells how these three men collaborated to solve the technical difficulties of developing a coupling device for TTYs that would translate sounds into discernible letters. More remarkably, and with the help of an expanding corps of Deaf advocates, they successfully assaulted the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which in its efforts to protect its monopoly, smashed old TTYs to keep them from being used for potentially competitive purposes. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also resisted efforts to build a telephone system for deaf people that was available, affordable, portable, and fully accessible. Lang recounts in vivid terms how many other Deaf individuals and groups from all walks of life joined Weitbrecht, Marsters, and Saks against these forces. A Phone of Their Own is an entertaining and engrossing story of how they fought and won, and changed the world for the better for deaf people everywhere.

Bogdan and his collaborators have studied thousands of historical photographs of people with disabilities in writing this book. Their work shows how people with disabilities have been presented but in a much wider range than we have ever seen before.

The Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series continues its detailed exploration of language dynamics among deaf people in the fourth entry, Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities. This volume’s ten meticulously prepared chapters reflect the refinements of research in six major sociolinguistics areas. Rob Hoopes’ work, “A Preliminary Examination of Pinky Extension: Suggestions Regarding Its Occurrence, Constraints, and Function,” commences Part One: Variation with a sound explanation of this American Sign Language (ASL) phonological characteristic. Part Two: Languages in Contact includes findings by Jean Ann on contact between Taiwanese Sign Language and written Taiwanese. Priscilla Shannon Gutierrez considers the relationship of educational policy with language and cognition in deaf children in Part Three: Language in Education, and in Part Four: Discourse Analysis, Melanie Metzger discusses eye gaze and pronominal reference in ASL. Part Five: Second-Language Learning presents the single chapter “An Acculturation Model for ASL Learners,” by Mike Kemp. Sarah E. Burns defines Irish Sign Language as Ireland’s second minority language after Gaelic, in Part Six: Language Attitudes, the final area of concentration in this rigorously researched volume. These studies and the others by the respected scholars featured in Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze make it an outstanding and eminently valuable addition to this series.