June 19: Helen Keller Mythbusting Day Blogswarm

More information here. Regular DSTU readers will know I love a good feminist disability history mythbusting blogswarm. I'm so there. Past mythbusting DSTU posts about Helen Keller include:

Keeping Helen Company in Statuary Hall
(was Helen Keller's statue the first showing a person with a disability in the US Capitol's Statuary Hall? No, not really)

June 27: Helen Keller (1880-1968)
(Is HK "the only feminist socialist Swedenborgian depicted on an American coin"? I assume so.)

Mook-Badhir
(Is there a Bollywood version of the Keller/Sullivan story, in which Teacher is an older male and Helen is a gorgeous twenty-something woman, and everyone sings? Yes there is!)

Join in the mythbusting fun! Note that you don't have to write about HK to participate; Anna suggests that some bloggers might want to "bust the myth that the only women with disabilities doing anything of interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were white women from the US!"

June 3: The Andrew Heiskell Library (b. 1895)

The New York Public Library is marking the 115th anniversary of the founding of the Talking Book and Braille Service in the US and in New York City. It started in 1895 with 57 braille books, a free circulating library set up by a blind man, Richard Randall Ferry (1839-1906). Ferry had been a prosperous hat manufacturer before becoming blind in 1891; he had the resources and the drive to get something like this started. By the time of Ferry's death (according to his obituary) there were 10,000 volumes.

In 1909, Ferry's assistant on the project, and one of the library's trustees, educator Clara A. Williams, wrote a plea in the New York Times, defending New York Point System against other braille formats. Her letter points to the state of flux such efforts faced just a century ago: "It seems a dreadful thing to me, for those living in New York State, and New York City, to allow any persons to come in from other States with a system of print which can be proved to be inferior, and tell us what we should do in our public schools, &c.... Miss Keller is certainly a wonderful woman, but she would, it seems to me, be biased in favor of any type for which her friends stood and it would be most natural for her to take the stand chosen by her teacher..." There were also concerns about whether the library would include a Bible (when "nearly every reader at the library has been presented with a Bible and has it in his own home").

The collection became part of the NYPL in 1903, and expanded over the years, in size, in format, and services offered. The technological history of recordings in the twentieth century is reflected in how audio books were prepared for blind readers over the years: hard discs, flexible discs, cassettes, and digital files have all taken their turn, in tandem with the devices required to play them.

Keeping Helen Company in Statuary Hall

[Visual description: black-and-white photograph of the statue of Father Damien in the National Statuary Hall]

A statue of Helen Keller was unveiled this week in the US Capitol's Statuary Hall, with great fanfare, because "It’s the first statue in the Capitol showing a person with a disability." Oh?

Regular readers of this blog will know that statements like this send me scurrying to check that list twice. I suspected that she was only the first famously-disabled person represented in Statuary Hall, because disability just isn't that rare. The difficulty of naming a definite "first" also reflects the very fluid nature of disability as a social category.

But even that iffy "famous for being disabled, like really disabled" distinction isn't quite true. Father Damien (1840-1889), Roman Catholic priest, quite famously contracted leprosy during his mission work on Molokai. Damien's statue, by Marisol Escobar, has been in the Capitol since 1969. The stylized bronze figure shows Damien holding a cane with a gnarled hand, and gives some indication of his facial scarring as well.

Hard to call the new Keller statue "the first" if Father Damien and his cane have been there for forty years, isn't it?

UPDATE: Wheelie Catholic also wrote about Father Damien this week--seems he's in the news.

Disability history is getting really popular with the kids...

"I wanted to be Helen Keller, but she got tooken by the very first kid!"
--my daughter Nell, after school today.

The third-graders at her school do a "Living Museum" every year, where they each dress in a costume and prepare a little talk about their historical figure. Then they each wear a "Press Here" paper button on their chests and stand along the walls of the cafeteria; the younger kids can come through and push the buttons to get the biographies recited. It's very cute. There's a standard list of names, the kids have to pick from it, one of each figure per room... and apparently HK was the first draft pick in Nell's room. I should find out when Louis Braille and Beethoven were picked up....

(Nell will be Mozart instead. That's fine, I can make some kind of a powdered wig in the next five weeks...)

Rose Parade float, Helen Keller, and Braille

So last month, I mentioned a family outing to the Getty. This month, we were "tourists in our own city" by going to the display of Rose Parade floats in Pasadena. For two days after the parade, the floats are parked along two streets and in a parking lot, along with food vendors and "white suits," the Rose Parade volunteers who explain how each float is made. (It's a little like if each painting in a museum had its own docent.)

The route was quite wheelable (we saw quite a number of other visitors using mobility equipment), and there were accessible buses from the park-and-ride sites. And the second float we saw was.... the Lions Club International float, titled "the Miracle Worker," with a giant black-and-white image of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan (made of rice, poppy seeds, and onion seeds, we were told); behind it, a giant pair of glasses, a white cane, and a stack of books titled "Braille," "Helen Keller," "The Miracle Worker" etc. The "white suit" at that float showed us a braille version of the Parade program, and invited the kids to feel the braille pages.

Further along, another "white suit" invited us to go inside the barriers to touch a float and examine it at even closer range. Apparently this is an accommodation offered to disabled visitors--so my son was soon holding a starfish made of lima beans and whiffing irises.

[Photos depict the Lions Club float as described in the text of this post.]

Helen Keller's Flickring

Helen Keller and Mrs. Macy (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

This week's batch of Flickr Commons uploads from the Library of Congress's G. G. Bain Collection includes a series of photos of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy, taken in some kind of conservatory or museum. In the photo I've featured here, Keller is seated in a wicker chair, and posed in profile, while Macy stands behind the chair and is seen face-on. Both women wear long dark dresses and have long hair arranged in low chignons at the nape. The Bain Collection photos are from 1910-1915.

If you have more information about the occasion or location of these photos, you can add that to the photos at Flickr. (The photos can also be tagged by visitors.)

November 17: Winifred Holt (1870-1945)

[Image description: black-and-white archival photo of two men seated at a table, in French military uniforms; they have their hands on a small checkerboard; one man appears to have his eyelids closed, and the other has fabric patches over both eyes; behind them, a woman in seated, and has her own hand stretched toward the checkerboard]

Co-founder of Lighthouse International (formerly the New York Association for the Blind) Winifred Holt was born on this date in 1870, in New York City, the daughter of publisher Henry Holt. She was a force in early twentieth-century advocacy --she and her organization worked for inclusion of blind children in New York public schools, for summer camps, vocational training programs and social groups run by and for blind people, for rehabilitation of blinded WWI veterans. She also worked for changes in medical protocols to prevent a common cause of blindness in newborns. She encouraged similar "Lighthouses" to operate in other cities around the world. Many of the projects she started continue in some form today.

In the photo above (found here, in the Library of Congress's Bain Collection), Holt is seen teaching newly blind French soldiers to play checkers in a rehabilitation program in France (Holt received the Legion d'Honneur for her wartime work there). Holt trained as a sculptor when she was a young woman; her best known work is a 1907 bas-relief bronze portrait of Helen Keller, online here. She also wrote a biography of blind English MP and postmaster Henry Fawcett.

December 21: Laura Dewey Bridgman (1829-1889)

Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her; her writingbook was on the desk she leaned upon.-From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.

--Charles Dickens, on Laura Bridgman

Laura Dewey Bridgman (shown in a late-life portrait, above left) was born on this date in 1829, in Hanover, New Hampshire. She was the third child in a farm family, but when she was two years old, the older sisters died from scarlet fever; Laura survived, blind, deaf, and without her senses of taste or smell. The Bridgmans developed a set of home signs, for Laura to express her needs, and for her parents to make simple requests or give praise; by age 7, Laura had also learned to sew, knit, and make beds.

In 1837, Laura Bridgman was enrolled as a student at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, under the direct instruction of Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe saw in Bridgman a blank slate for proving theories of education and the mind; ignoring her earlier learning in the family home, he touted her as a perfect subject for his experiments in language. She learned to read raised-letter text fairly soon, and fingerspelling enough to communicate with others; Howe's reports include long quotes from their tutorial conversations. Howe made Bridgman a star attraction at the school's "Observation Days" events, where the public was invited to see the work of the school in exhibitions and tours. Charles Dickens made a visit to Perkins to see Laura Bridgman in 1842. A chapter of Dickens' American Notes is about Bridgman.

In 1843, Samuel Gridley Howe married Julia Ward, and left the day-to-day care and teaching of Laura Bridgman to his assistants; she became a teenager, no longer a sweet child, nor a novelty to the public. She had learned a great deal, but did not show the spark of genius Howe hoped to find, and he was disappointed in his project. She tried to return to her family in New Hampshire, but none of them could fingerspell with her, and she eventually lived at Perkins for
the rest of her life, helping around the school, teaching some. Late in her life, Laura Bridgman met young Helen Keller, when she came to Perkins; the rather formal New Englander scolded the boisterous Southern girl to "wash your hands," and complained afterwards that Keller had untidy fingernails.

In 2002, Bridgman was the subject of two new book-length biographies:

Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (Farrar Straus Giroux 2002).

Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman: The First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language (Harvard University Press 2002).

See also:

Douglas C. Baynton, "Laura Bridgman and the History of Disability," Reviews in American History 30(2)(2002): 227-235. [a review of Gitter and Freeberg]

Ernest Freeberg, "'An Object of Peculiar Interest': The Education of Laura Bridgman," Church History 61(2)(June 1992): 191-205.

Good news from Toledo

The Regional Disability Archive collection in the Ward M. Canaday Center is set to receive the Society of Ohio Archivists' Merit Award for 2007, in recognition of its work to collect, preserve, and make available records documenting disability in northwest Ohio. The award will be presented at the Midwest Archives Conference meeting on May 4, in Columbus. The Regional Disability Archive in Toledo includes the papers of Hugh Gallagher, among other very interesting records. (The photo at left shows a girl using crutches and a younger girl flanking Helen Keller, seated, in a black dress; from the Toledo Rotary Club Records, held at the Canaday Center.)

And, coming in the fall of 2008, the Canaday Center will collaborate with the Disability Studies program and the Public History Institute in the University of Toledo history department to mount an exhibit on the history of disability in northwest Ohio, with a nice grant from the university's Program for Academic Excellence. There's word that an online virtual exhibit will complement the in-person version, too, so we may all get a chance to visit this worthy project.

Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage, Berkeley, November 30

If you're in the Bay Area next Thursday, you won't want to miss attending a reading and discussion at Mrs. Dalloway's bookstore in Berkeley, where Georgina Kleege will be talking about her new book, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Gallaudet University Press 2006, cover shown at left).

Wheelchair Dancer just this week posted the first paragraph of Blind Rage--go have a read. And you may also want to check out Kleege's earlier book of essays about blindness, Sight Unseen (Yale University Press 1999).

June 27: Helen Keller (1880-1968)

According to the Ouch! blog, this week is Deafblind Awareness Week in the UK. Perhaps not coincidentally, today is the 126th anniversary of the birth of Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Although popular cultural images of Keller focus on her childhood and early education, she lived to be almost 88 years old, active in the causes of socialism, suffrage, and peace. Recent Keller scholarship presents a far more complicated portrait of this well-known American, including her ambivalent relationship with disability rights and the ways her biography gets adapted (to the point of sanitized) for various purposes. She is surely the only feminist socialist Swedenborgian depicted on an American coin, for example (she's on US quarters as the emblem of her home state, Alabama).

Some recent works on Keller include:

Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (NYU Press 2004).

Kim E. Nielsen, ed. Helen Keller: Selected Writings (NYU Press 2005).

Kim E. Nielsen, "Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness," in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds. (NYU Press 2001).

Georgina Kleege, "Helen Keller and 'the Empire of the Normal,'" American Quarterly 52(2)(2000): 322-325.

Liz Crow, "Helen Keller: Rethinking a Problematic Icon," Disability and Society 15(6)(2000): 845-859.

J. C. Quicke, "'Speaking Out': The Political Career of Helen Keller," Disability and Society 3(2)(January 1998): 167-171.

Keller's The Story of My Life (1903) is available as an e-text from Project Gutenberg.

The Helen Keller Archives at the American Foundation for the Blind is an extensive online (open-access) collection of her letters, photographs, and other items.

Mook-Badhir

I want one of these jackets. Please tell me someone acquired one for a disability history archive somewhere.

Edited to add: Looking into the story, I ran across this recent story also about Deaf culture in India. The movie it mentions, Black, is (believe it or not) a Bollywood treatment of... the Helen Keller/Annie Sullivan story, as explained here. Except it's set in the present. And the deaf-blind character is a gorgeous twentysomething (Rani Mukherjee). And her teacher is a sixty-something leading man (Amitabh Bachchan). And it's a musical (of course).