175th Anniversary of the American Annals of the Deaf: Part III—1961 to the Present

The editorial for this issue is the third and final rendition of a celebration of the 175th anniversary of the American Annals of the Deaf. In this issue, I cover the period from 1961 to the present. Much as in the editorials in the two previous celebration issues (Paul, 2022a, 2022b), my initial primary focus was on articles covering various aspects of the development of language and literacy. However, here I have strayed from this original emphasis to discuss other interesting, perhaps groundbreaking articles.

The time frame covered by this editorial, and by this special Annals issue, has been marked by stark economic and political events in America. These include the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the emergence of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the stock market crash of 1987, and the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—to name a few. Events that have affected the education and social welfare of individuals of color, those with disabilities, and others include the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, better known as Public Law 94-142 (and subsequently amended several times), the American With Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The period since 1961 has also seen the rise of inclusion and the disability rights movement, challenging the utility and effectiveness of special education programs and services and our long-standing perspectives on constructs such as disability and deafness. I could go on—think of the explosive impact of the Internet and the introduction of transformational digital devices (e.g., iPads, iPhones) and social media platforms. Oh yeah, Gallaudet University appointed its first deaf president in 1988. And I was proud to be selected the first deaf editor of the Annals in 2011.

Range of topics

There was no avoiding the challenge posed by the selection of articles for discussion and the few chosen for reprinting in this issue. Initially, I was intrigued by the titles and quick perusals of 146 articles. This was a smaller number than those I considered for the first celebration issue (194), and much smaller than the total contemplated for the second (338). Looking at issues from 1998 to about 2010, I was captivated by a few of the editorials by the previous Annals editor, Donald F. Moores, covering controversial and interesting topics such as demography (Moores, 2001a), teacher preparation (Moores, 2003), the No Child Left Behind Act (Moores, 2004), and residential schools (Moores, 2009). Several of his editorials on cochlear implants were also of interest (Moores, 2002, 2005, 2008–2009, 2010). Perhaps Moores’s approach and style of writing served as an inspiration for my editorials.

Looking at articles from the inception of my editorship in 2011 to the present, I found it difficult to select articles to read (again!) and discuss or to highlight as reprints. In fact, making selections for the 50 years from 1961 to 2011 was equally difficult because I had read and synthesized a number of articles on a range of topics—such as American Sign Language– English bilingualism, Cued Speech, the developmental differences between deaf children of deaf parents and deaf children of hearing parents, language and literacy development, lipreading/speechreading, signed systems, and vocabulary—in writing my own published works. I hope that some of my readers are familiar with my stances on these issues. Of course, I promise not to say anything more here about the qualitative similarity hypothesis (Wang & Andrews, 2014, 2015).

As usual, the Annals contained information on a wide range of topics—not only the above-mentioned cochlear implants (pros and cons!), Cued Speech, inclusion, and digital technology, but also communication and signed systems, instructional television, intelligence (oh, the debates…), internal speech, locus of control, mainstreaming, mathematics, the purpose of science in the curriculum, signed language, speech and hearing issues, Visual Phonics, visual sequential memory, and on and on. Several issues of the Annals provided lists of speech and hearing centers, organizations and associations (National Association of the Deaf, etc...