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Forbidden Signs explores American culture from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920 through the lens of one striking episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people. The ensuing debate over sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages," humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, Baynton found that although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language. "Baynton's brilliant and detailed history, Forbidden Signs, reminds us that debates over the use of dialects or languages are really the linguistic tip of a mostly submerged argument about power, social control, nationalism, who has the right to speak and who has the right to control modes of speech."-Lennard J. Davis, The Nation "Forbidden Signs is replete with good things."-Hugh Kenner, New York Times Book Review

Deaf --- Sign language --- Gesture language --- Language and languages --- Gesture --- Signs and symbols --- Deaf-mutes --- Deaf people --- Deafness --- Hearing impaired --- Deafblind people --- Means of communication --- History. --- Study and teaching --- Social conditions. --- Patients --- #KVHA:Cultuurgeschiedenis; Amerikaanse gebarentaal --- 376.33 --- 376.33 Gehoorgestoorden: onderwijs. Doven: onderwijs --- Gehoorgestoorden: onderwijs. Doven: onderwijs --- Means of communication&delete& --- History --- Social conditions --- Study and teaching&delete& --- United States --- Deaf - Means of communication - United States - History. --- Sign language - Study and teaching - United States - History. --- Deaf - United States - Social conditions.

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Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the "undesirable immigrant." Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton's groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily intended to keep people with disabilities-known as "defectives"-out of the country. The list of those included is long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of "poor physique" and men diagnosed with "feminism." Not only were disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration laws were a cohesive whole-a decades-long effort to find an effective method of excluding people considered to be defective. This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.

Immigrants --- Eugenics --- People with disabilities --- Medical examinations --- History. --- Legal status, laws, etc. --- United States --- Emigration and immigration --- Government policy. --- eugenics, disability, public health, immigration, population control, race, ethnicity, "as, undesirable, defective, exclusion, national identity, competition, capitalism, deafness, blind, epilepsy, mobility, scoliosis, disease, hernias, club feet, asylum, lgbtq, queer theory, intersexual, lameness, mental illness, developmental delays, degeneration, heredity, medical examination, handicapped, dependent, independence, labor, laws, legislation, government policy.