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The collective social history of deaf people in America has yet to be written. While scholars have focused their attention on residential schools for the deaf, leaders in the deaf community, and prominent graduates of these institutions, the lives of “ordinary” deaf individuals have been largely overlooked. Employing the methods of social history, such as the use of digital history techniques and often-ignored sources like census records, Eric C. Nystrom and R. A. R. Edwards recover the lived experiences of everyday deaf people in late nineteenth century America.
Ordinary Lives captures the stories of deaf women and men, both Black and white, describing their family lives, networks of support, educational experiences, and successes and hardships. In this pioneering “deaf social history,” Edwards and Nystrom reconstruct the biographies of a wider range of deaf individuals to tell a richer, more nuanced, and more inclusive history of the larger American deaf community.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1
Deaf History, Cultural History, and Social History - Chapter 2
Deafness and the Census - Chapter 3
Population - Chapter 4
Lydia Macomber’s Network - Chapter 5
Becoming a National Community - Chapter 6
Race - Chapter 7
Geography - Chapter 8
The Deaf Vineyard in 1880 - Chapter 9
Institutions and Work - Chapter 10
Joseph DeHart - Conclusion and Future Directions
- Appendix: Queries
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Eric C. Nystrom is associate professor of history at Arizona State University.
R. A. R. Edwards is professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology and author of
Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture.
