Deaf History and the U.S. Historical Narrative

Susan Burch. Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to 1942. New York: New York University Press, 2002. ix + 230 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $38.00.

Susan Burch's rich and well-researched chronicle of the U.S. Deaf community's efforts to claim and shape their full participation in public life between 1900 and 1942 reminds historians of the many forms debates have taken in U.S. history regarding how a proper citizen should look, act, and speak.In Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, Burch makes clear the active and successful efforts of Deaf people to create a culturally unique community that advocated for the full legal, social, and financial citizenship of all deaf people. ¹ This vigorous self-advocacy occurred despite, and ironically partially because of, the attacks on deafness and Deaf culture facilitated by larger trends in U.S. history such as eugenics and the related Americanization campaigns. Signs of Resistance is a welcome and well-researched addition to twentieth-century United States history that builds on the work of other historians and theorists of politics, disability, gender, race, education, and community.

Signs of Resistance is an example of applying to deafness what historian Paul Longmore calls an "intellectual analysis based on a minority group or sociopolitical paradigm." ² This analysis moves away from a medical model of disability, which understands disability to be an individual pathology of the body that necessitates treatment. It also moves away from a sentimental cultural model of disability, which posits disability as a tragic affliction meriting pity and seclusion. Instead this approach examines how politics, culture, economics, and larger ideological notions of normality define who is and who is not disabled; or conversely, who is and who is not normal. It also reveals the depths to which those definitions of disability and normality are ever-changing, are historically bound, and have immense consequence. Using disability as a tool of analysis thus necessitates a profound rethinking of power and the dynamics that create social power.It demands the difficult recognition that disability is frequently based not on physical impairment, but on the ways those with greater power in society view disability and thus construct society, both metaphorically and physically. As Signs of Resistance illustrates, because of the economic, legal, and cultural implications, how we define disability and designate who is labeled disabled has powerful results. As with the case of the U.S. Deaf community, this power was highly contested.

Signs of Resistancealso unquestionably illustrates, as Burch states, that "the lives and experiences of Deaf Americans were inextricably tied to broader currents in American history" (p. 5). A strength of this book is the implicit but convincing argument, which could be made more explicit, that eugenics, Americanization, English-only campaigns, and notions of normality cannot be understood historically without including Deaf people. Deaf cultural history is a strong example of how disability history, by analyzing the concept of disability and its ramifications, can assist all historians in their understanding of broader historical currents. Burch also makes clear that rich and numerous sources exist to chronicle the lives of people with disabilities. Paucity of sources is not a legitimate reason for failing to weave Deaf Americans into the historical narrative.

Permanent residential schools for deaf people in the United States began in 1817 with the founding of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, under the directorship of Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the pedagogical leadership of Laurent Clerc. The rapidly expanding number of residential schools encouraged and made possible the development of a flourishing Deaf community by the mid-nineteenth century, with its own religious institutions, publications, social and labor associations, and soon its own college.

Burch begins Signs of Resistance in 1900. At this point, a convergence of eugenics, industrialization, growing faith in scientific improvement, and professionalization had developed into intense efforts to acculturate many marginal groups—among them...