Howe, Samuel Gridley

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Samuel Gridley Howe
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    2
    No. of Children
    6
    Family
    Joseph Neals Howe (father), Patty Gridley (mother), Julia Ward (first wife, 1843), Julia Romana (second wife, 1870)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Brown University; Harvard Medical School
    Occupation
    Educator
    Journalist
    Doctor, Dentist or Nurse
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Government
    Grant Administration (1869-77)
    Military
    Foreign military

    Samuel Gridley Howe (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Armed with equal education ideals, he believed that the blind should no longer be doomed to inequality, to becoming only "mere objects of pity." During his first years as director [of the Perkins Institution for the Blind], he visited seventeen states, establishing schools in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. He also developed an embossed-letter system for the blind to read, first known as Howe Type, and later as Boston Line Type. It was used at Perkins until Braille came into common usage at the turn of the century.

    In 1837 Howe began an experiment in education that would bring him to the attention of the world, that of educating Laura Bridgman, a girl who had become deaf-blind from scarlet fever at the age of two. His success in educating her proved that it was possible to educate a deaf-blind person…

    In 1848 he started the first public institution in the United States to educate the mentally retarded. He also became involved in deaf education, helping to establish the Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes (now the Clarke School for the Deaf) in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1867. He has rightly been called the most significant and foresighted figure in the American history of special education. He also participated in the reform of public school education with Horace Mann, in prison reform, in helping the mentally ill with Dorothea Dix, and in the antislavery movement.
    Kenneth Stuckey, "Howe, Samuel Gridley," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00349.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Renehan, Edward J., Jr. The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. view record
    Rossbach, Jeffery S. Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Howe, Samuel Gridley," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5936.