Abbé Sicard was a French revolutionary priest and an innovator of French and American sign language. He enjoyed a meteoric rise from Toulouse and Bordeaux to Paris and, despite his non-conformist tendencies, he escaped the guillotine. In fact, the revolutionaries acknowledged his position and during the Terror of 1794, they made him the director of the first school for the deaf. Later, he became a member of the first Ecole Normale, the National Institute, and the Académie Française. He is recognized today as having developed Enlightenment theories of pantomime, "signing,' and a form of "universal language" that later spread to Russia, Spain, and America. This is the first book-length biography of Sicard published in any language since 1873, despite Sicard’s international renown. This thoughtful, engaging work explores French and American sign language and deaf studies set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

This volume offers the first translation of 19th-century Deaf French activist Ferdinand Berthier's biographical sketches of the four men who influenced him most in shaping his unswerving beliefs about Deaf French education.

Sicard founded the National Institution of Deaf Mutes during the Terror. Paradoxically, the abbé was a non-conformist priest who was arrested frequently, until his supporters intervened. Later his students gave public demonstrations of his grammatical definitions attracting international curiosity.

A fictionalized autobiography in which the voice of Laurent Clerc describes his boyhood in France as a deaf student and his development of his own progressive methods to teach the deaf.

In a culture where beauty is currency, women’s bodies are often perceived as measures of value and worth. The search for visibility and self-acceptance can be daunting, especially for those on the cultural margins of “beauty.” Becoming Women offers a thoughtful examination of the search for identity in an image-oriented world. That search is told through the experiences of a group of women who came of age in the wake of second and third wave feminism, featuring voices from marginalized and misrepresented groups. Carla Rice pairs popular imagery with personal narratives to expose the “culture of contradiction” where increases in individual body acceptance have been matched by even more restrictive feminine image ideals and norms. With insider insights from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, Rice exposes the beauty industry’s colonization of women’s bodies, and examines why “the beauty myth” has yet to be resolved.

Grayson makes sign language accessible, easy, and fun with this comprehensive primer to the techniques, words, and phrases of signing. 800 illustrative photos.

The authoritative statement on the deaf, their education, and their struggle against prejudice.