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:
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)