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:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)