In 1988, Nora Groce wrote a ground-breaking book titled, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard.
From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha’s Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most Deaf people at the time, the Deaf Vineyarders were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen—and did not see themselves—as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. On the Vineyard, hearing and Deaf islanders alike grew up using a sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the Deaf, which so isolated many Deaf people, did not exist.
In this image, Call idealizes the Deaf mother welcoming the ships and sailors coming to and from the Vineyard as a vision of the socialization of sign language and the acceptance of Deaf people within the general community.
Alice Cogswell (1805–1830) was the inspiration to Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet for the creation of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, the first school for Deaf children in the United States.
At the age of two, Alice became ill with "spotted fever" (cerebral-spinal meningitis). This illness took her hearing and later she lost her speech as well. At the time, deafness was viewed as equivalent to a mental illness, and it was widely believed that the deaf could not be taught. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a local Christian minister decided to teach her to communicate through pictures and writing letters in the dirt. He and Alice's father, Dr. Mason Cogswell, decided that a formal school would be best for her, but no such school for deal children existed in the United States.
Alice Cogswell and six other deaf students entered the school that would become the American School for the Deaf in April 1817. Within the American Deaf Community, Alice Cogswell is a remarkable figure in the history of deaf culture, illustrating a breakthrough in deaf education. She showed that the Deaf are capable of learning and contributing to the general society.
The Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, an international conference of deaf educators, was held in Milan, Italy in 1880. Commonly known as "the Milan Conference or Milan Congress," the conference declared, after many heated deliberations, that oral education (oralism) was superior to manual education and passed a resolution banning the use of sign language in school. After its passage in 1880, schools in European countries and the United States switched to using speech therapy without sign language as a method of education for the deaf. In the United States, sign language use was banned in classrooms and Deaf children were forced to hide their use of American Sign Language (ASL).
The imagery of a hand crucified on the cross is quite disturbing but purposely so. The quick manner in which the educational systems in the United States fell into lock-step with the ban on ASL was a singularly repressive action on a community which sees itself as an ethnic minority.
