✦
Why The Scream Is Not a Scream
✦
How American Sign Language Learned French
✦
The Quiet Bagpipe Scotland Forgot
✦

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

On the morning of February 12, 1994, Norway was busy opening the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Meanwhile, two men propped a ladder against the National Gallery in Oslo, climbed in through a window and left with the most famous painting in the country. They left behind a note that read "Thanks for the poor security," which was rude but hard to argue with. The painting was The Scream, which the gallery had helpfully moved to a lower floor for the Olympic celebrations. When the museum refused a ransom demand of one million dollars, Norwegian police teamed up with British detectives and the Getty Museum on a sting, and the picture came home undamaged that May. In August 2004 it happened again. Masked gunmen walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight and carried off a second version of The Scream along with Munch's Madonna, and that one stayed missing for two years. Being stolen twice is a strange kind of compliment.

The reason there were two to steal is that Edvard Munch never made just one. He produced two versions in paint and two in pastel, along with a lithograph stone from which dozens of prints were pulled, starting in 1893. The image itself came from a walk. In a diary entry from 1892, Munch described strolling along a path above the Oslo fjord at sunset, feeling tired and ill, when the clouds turned "blood red" and he "sensed a scream passing through nature," which means the figure on the bridge is not the one screaming. It is clamping its hands over its ears against a scream coming from everything around it. Scholars still argue about that blazing sky. Some blame ash from Krakatoa, which turned sunsets red around the world after 1883, while others point out that the hill above the path overlooked the asylum where Munch's sister Laura was a patient.

Munch knew exactly what people would make of it. In the corner of the 1893 painting, almost too faint to see, someone wrote in pencil "Could only have been painted by a madman!" For years it was assumed to be the work of an angry visitor. Then in 2021 the National Museum of Norway examined the handwriting with infrared imaging and concluded that Munch had written it himself, probably after critics savaged the picture when it was shown in Norway in 1895. Mental illness ran in his family, so the jab stung. The market, at least, disagreed. In 2012 one of the pastel versions sold at Sotheby's in New York for nearly 120 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for an artwork at public auction. The man who worried he would be dismissed as mad ended up painting the face the modern world makes when it reads the news, and most of us carry a copy in our pockets, since the screaming emoji on our phones is usually drawn to look like him.

In the 1700s and 1800s, if you stepped off a boat in the village of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard, there was a good chance the fishermen and farmers would greet you with their hands. The English families who settled the island in the late seventeenth century had married among themselves for generations, and because the deafness some of them carried was hereditary, it spread until it touched roughly one in every twenty-five people in Chilmark. Rather than treat it as a misfortune, the town simply learned to sign, and hearing residents used it too, during church sermons and between boats at sea. The historian Nora Ellen Groce later collected the memories of older islanders in a 1985 book called Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language.

The larger thing began with a little girl in Hartford, Connecticut. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a Yale graduate training for the ministry, became fascinated by Alice Cogswell, the deaf daughter of a neighbor, and set off for Europe to learn how deaf children could be taught. He found his answer in Paris, at the school founded by the Abbé de l'Épée in the eighteenth century, and persuaded one of its deaf teachers, Laurent Clerc, to come back to America with him. On April 15, 1817, the two opened what is now the American School for the Deaf, with Clerc teaching in French Sign Language. Many of the students came from Martha's Vineyard, and others brought village sign languages from New Hampshire and Maine or the home signs their families had invented, and out of that classroom collision a new language emerged. Even today, about 58 percent of American signs share roots with old French signs, which is why an American signer has far more in common with Paris than with London, where British Sign Language is a different language entirely.

In 1864 Gallaudet's youngest son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, launched what became Gallaudet University in Washington, the first university in the world for deaf students. Then came a long setback. In 1880 an international congress of educators in Milan declared speech superior to signing, and schools across Europe and America pushed sign language out of their classrooms, an approach that dominated deaf education into the 1950s. The rescue came from a Gallaudet English professor named William Stokoe, who studied how his students signed and argued, first in 1960 and then in a 1965 dictionary, that ASL was a complete language with its own grammar. In March 1988 Gallaudet's board chose a hearing candidate as president over two deaf finalists, and students shut the campus down with barricades and buses whose tires they had let down. Within a week, I. King Jordan became the university's first deaf president. Since 2019, April 15 has been celebrated as National American Sign Language Day, chosen because it is the day that school in Hartford first opened its doors.