History
In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, hearing families with deaf children have historically employed ad-hoc home sign, idiosyncratic systems of hand gesture that do not amount to full language, for rudimentary communication. There were however exceptions, such as the community of Martha's Vineyard, where a large percentage of the population was deaf and the entire hearing population was able to sign a true sign language. Elsewhere the development of sign language required the emergence of deaf schools, which brought large numbers of deaf children together. The story of ASL begins with deaf education, Martha's Vineyard, and a minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who was enlisted by a father to educate his deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell in 1814.
Read more about this topic: American Sign Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)