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Extract (18 pp.) bound in modern paper wrappers. Clean and fresh throughout. A fine copy. Samuel Gridley Howe s report on the education of Laura Bridgman (1829 1889), the first deaf-blind person to receive formal schooling in the United States. This report covers the first three years of Bridgman s education at the Perkins School for the Blind, focusing on the efforts of Howe and other Perkins educators to develop Bridgman s language skills. Howe and his staff experimented with different ways to teach Bridgman to communicate; eventually, they devised a method of sharing common objects with her and then using large movable type, set in a specially-made metal frame, to spell out the names of those objects. In the process of educating Bridgman, Howe developed a groundbreaking language acquisition curriculum that shaped the education of Helen Keller and many other deaf-blind students at the Perkins School. Bridgman was educated at the Perkins School between 1837 and 1850, during which she developed an international reputation. In 1842, Charles Dickens met with Bridgman at the Perkins School and included the story in his American Notes, which launched Bridgman into fame. It was this inclusion, in fact, that led to Helen Keller being educated at the Perkins School: Keller s mother had read Dickens' account of Bridgman and sought medical assistance for her daughter, which eventually led to Keller being referred to the Perkins School by Alexander Graham Bell. Though Bridgman concluded her education at the Perkins School in 1850 and went to live with her family, she struggled outside of the environment of the school. Her friend, the activist Dorthea Dix, raised money for an endowment to support her continued residence at the school. Bridgman returned to the Perkins School soon after, where she befriended and lived with Anne Sullivan, Keller s teacher and companion. Bridgman spent the rest of her life at the Perkins School, helping to maintain the school s cottages and creating skillful lacework and other needlework pieces, some of which are now preserved in museums and in the collections of the Perkins School. Howe and his family were well known for their activism and philanthropy. Howe was the first director of the Perkins School and a prominent abolitionist, as was Julia Ward Howe, his wife. The couple s daughters Maud, Florence, and Laura were Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers of their mother. Maud and Florence also collaborated on Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (1903), in which they called their father s education of Bridgman "the most conspicuous achievement of his life." Despite the importance of Howe s work with Bridgman, and despite the urging of his contemporaries to publish more widely, information on her education was largely confined to the Annual Reports of the Perkins School. Howe had plans to publish a book on Bridgman, but died before he was able: his daughters lamented the fact, and wrote, "It is an irreparable loss that the story was never told as he alone could have told it." This report, then, is an important summary of Howe s early work with Bridgman and his innovative efforts to develop educational methods for deaf-blind students. Fine. Seller Inventory # 6651
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