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DEAF, HISTORY OF THE
The history of deaf people has been written as a history of hearing perceptions of deaf people, as a history of the education of deaf people and as the history of the lives and communities of deaf people themselves. This history embodies some of the major strands of disability studies scholarship: the reactions of outsiders to those with a physical difference, shifting understandings of normalcy, and the existence of a community of people who create lives based on a different sensory universe than that of those around them.
EARLY DEAF COMMUNITIES
Unique among individuals with a sensory difference in that they are also a linguistic minority, deaf people have long formed communities whenever they come together in a specific geographic location. Most scholars attribute the development of Deaf communities to the establishment of schools for the deaf and the desire of its alumni to associate with one another afterward. But there is also evidence that whenever a significant number of deaf people exist in one geographic location, they will form social relationships with one another and with hearing people who use sign language. The island of Martha's Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast, was an example of such a community. From the seventeenth to the midtwentieth centuries, a significant population of deaf people coexisted alongside their hearing counterparts in certain towns on the island. In these towns, nearly everyone was able to use some form of sign language and deafness was an accepted, unremarkable fact of daily life.
Communities such as that found on Martha's Vineyard are likely rare. There were few, if any, politically organized European communities of deaf people in the Early Modern era. There were, however, early small-scale attempts by European religious orders to educate the deaf children of rich noble families. Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de Leon is the most prominent of these early teachers, and in the 1540s taught the deaf brothers Don Francisco and Don Pedro de Velasco, as well as 10 to 12 other deaf people, at his monastery. De Leon's work would be replicated in other small-scale schools throughout Europe, but state sponsorship of Deaf education would begin only in the eighteenth century.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The Enlightenment brought about a new faith in reason and a new curiosity on the part of scholars on the ability of deaf people to achieve rational and abstract thought. In this period, the education of deaf people attracted prominent attention, and historians have generally pointed to Paris as the crucible of Deaf education in the modern era. In Paris, the Abbé CharlesMichel de l'Épée founded what would eventually become the first state-supported school for deaf children, today known as the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds (INJS). Beginning with a class for two deaf sisters, de l'Épée's school served as a model and source of inspiration for the establishment of other European schools. These schools generally followed the INJS's use of a signed language to teach deaf children in their national spoken and written language. A school established in Leipzig, Germany, in 1778 by Samuel Heinicke exemplified the “oral method,” a method emphasizing training in speechreading and articulation as a means for deaf people to learn their national language.
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