Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language

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 f...