http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/840303645

Signs of Resistance American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003. During the nineteenth century, American schools for deaf education regarded sign language as the "natural language" of Deaf people, using it as the principal mode of instruction and communication. These schools inadvertently became the seedbeds of an emerging Deaf community and culture. But beginning in the 1880s, an oralist movement developed that sought to suppress sign language, removing Deaf teachers and requiring deaf people to learn speech and lip reading. Historians have all assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century oral.

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