ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL HDT WHAT? INDEX ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL 19TH CENTURY 1817 April 15, Tuesday: After federal funding had been denied, the New York Legislature created a fund for the construction of the Erie, Champlain, and Hudson Canal. Ground was 1st broken at Rome on the 4th of July, and it would be completed on the 26th of October, 1825. ERIE CANAL The institution which would become the American School for the Deaf was founded in Hartford. This was the first American school for those who could not hear. (Many schools available, of course, for those Americans who would not hear.) It had been in the early years of the 19th Century that the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet of Hartford, Connecticut had tried to teach Alice Cogswell, the deaf daughter of a surgeon. The Reverend Gallaudet had then visited the French National Institution for Deaf-Mutes and persuaded Laurent Clerc to come to the United States. On the 52-day voyage back across the Atlantic, Gallaudet had helped Clerc with English while Clerc had helped Gallaudet with sign language. Clerc was himself a tolerant man, but he would die in 1869 and his successors would not be tolerant, they would be “oralists” of the stamp HDT WHAT? INDEX ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL of Horace Mann, Sr. who would attempt to intercept the teaching of sign language to the deaf. The impaired were to be forced to learn to make sounds even if the sounds which they produced were just awful because they themselves could not hear these sounds. Their speaking teacher would not need to know anything about sign language and would not need to have any previous experience with deaf children, any more than a teacher would have needed to have previous experience with idiots before attempting to manage them. The impaired would be forced to “learn to read lips” even if the best that could ever be achieved by “lip- reading” techniques due to the inherent ambiguity of mouth shaping was the understanding of but one sentence in ten. It would become a discipline problem, it would become a matter of training in obedience. Eventually, during our own lifetimes, if these children were caught trying to sign to each other behind their speaking teacher’s back, the teacher was instructed to draw lines upon their offending hands with a ruler. The story of the suppression of American Sign Language (ASL) is a familiar one in the rich folkloric history of the American deaf community. Few scholars, however, are aware of the campaign to eradicate ASL that began in the late nineteenth century and was led by such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell, Franklin [Benjamin] Sanborn, and Gardiner Greene Hubbard.... The reasons for the suppression were various and complex. They included perceived similarities between the deaf community and ethnic communities at a time of intense nativism, an imagined hierarchy of languages constructed from the new theories of evolution, and the rise of the concept of normality. (Alexander Graham Bell would maintain that the ideal school “would contain only one deaf child.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL 1847 March 3, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Professor Alexander Melville Bell (an “elocutionist,” that is, a speech expert and teacher) and Eliza Grace Symonds (Symmonds) Bell. He was the 2d of their 3 sons, his siblings being Melville born in 1845 and Edward born in 1848. In the US Army, Colonel Franklin Pierce was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. WAR ON MEXICO Continuing along the tragic trajectory of the Donner disaster, Reed left the emigrant camps with 17 travelers: • Patrick and Margaret Breen and their children John, James F., Peter, Patrick Jr., and Isabella • Mary and Isaac Donner and their half brother Solomon Hook • Elizabeth Graves and her children Nancy, Jonathan, Franklin Ward, Jr., and Elizabeth • Patty and Tommy Reed. An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on her travel experiences from London to Paris was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: READ ABOUT THIS Paris. When I wrote last I could not finish with London, and there remain yet two or three things I wish to speak of before passing to my impressions of this wonder-full Paris. I visited the model prison at Pentonville; but though in some respects an improvement upon others I have seen, — though there was the appearance of great neatness and order in the arrangements of life, kindness and good judgment in the discipline of the prisoners, — yet there was also an air of bleak forlornness about the place, and it fell far short of what my mind demands of such abodes considered as redemption schools. But as the subject of prisons is now engaging the attention of many of the wisest and best, and the tendency is in what seems to me the true direction, I need not trouble myself to make prude and hasty suggestions; it is a subject to which persons who would be of use should give the earnest devotion of calm and leisurely thought. The same day I went to see an establishment which gave me unmixed pleasure; it is a bathing establishment put at a very low rate to enable the poor to avoid one of thee worst miseries of their lot, and which yet promises to pay. Joined with this is an establishment for washing clothes, where the poor can go and hire, for almost nothing, good tubs, water ready heated, the use of an apparatus for rinsing, drying, and ironing, all so admirably arranged that a poor woman can in three hours get through an amount of washing and ironing that would, under ordinary circumstances, occupy three or four days. Especially the drying closets I contemplated with great satisfaction, and hope to see in our own country the same arrangements throughout the cities, and even in the towns and villages. Hanging out the clothes is a great exposure for women, even when they have a good place for it; but when, as is so common in cities, they must dry them in the house, how much they suffer! In New York, I know, those poor women who take in washing endure a great deal of trouble and toil from this cause; I have suffered myself from HDT WHAT? INDEX ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL being obliged to send back what had cost them so much toil, because it had been, perhaps inevitably, soiled in the drying or ironing, or filled with the smell of their miscellaneous cooking. In London it is much worse. An eminent physician told me he knew of two children whom he considered to have died because their mother, having but one room to live in, was obliged to wash and dry clothes close to their bed when they were ill. The poor people in London naturally do without washing all they can, and beneath that perpetual fall of soot the result may be guessed. All but the very poor in England put out their washing, and this custom ought to be universal in civilized countries, as it can be done much better and quicker by a few regular laundresses than by many families, and “the washing day” is so malignant a foe to the peace and joy of households that it ought to be effaced from the calendar. But as long as we are so miserable as to have any very poor people in this world, they cannot put out their washing, because they cannot earn enough money to pay for it, and, preliminary to something better, washing establishments like this of London are desirable. One arrangement that they have here in Paris will be a good one, even when we cease to have any very poor people, and, please Heaven, also to have any very rich. These are the Crèches, — houses where poor women leave their children to be nursed during the day while they are at work. I must mention that the superintendent of the washing establishment observed, with a legitimate triumph, that it had been built without giving a single dinner or printing a single puff, — an extraordinary thing, indeed, for England! To turn to something a little gayer, — the embroidery on this tattered coat of civilized life, — I went into only two theatres; one the Old Drury, once the scene of great glories, now of execrable music and more execrable acting. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it. At the Sadler’s Wells theatre I saw a play which I had much admired in reading it, but found still better in actual representation; indeed, it seems to me there can be no better acting play: this is “The Patrician’s Daughter,” by J.W. Marston. The movement is rapid, yet clear and free; the dialogue natural, dignified, and flowing; the characters marked with few, but distinct strokes. Where the tone of discourse rises with manly sentiment or passion, the audience applauded with bursts of generous feeling that gave me great pleasure, for this play is one that, in its scope and meaning, marks the new era in England; it is full of an experience which is inevitable to a man of talent there, and is harbinger of the day when the noblest commoner shall be the only noble possible in England. But how different all this acting to what I find in France! Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout.