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Origins of the American Deaf-World - Coggle Diagram
Origins of the American Deaf-World
Henniker, New Hampshire
The first great American Deaf leader was Thomas Brown (1804–1886),
who was born in Henniker, New Hampshire, thirteen years before the
American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb opened in Hartford, Connecticut, and who died in Henniker six years after the Congress of Milan.
We begin with his story.
the first initiative for creating a Deaf state
was organized by a group of seniors at the American Asylum just two
years after Thomas left.13 It was, however, short lived.
Chilmark, Massachusetts
Thomas met Mary Smith, whose family came from the
Vineyard, where Deaf people—especially in some remote communities
“up island” such as Tisbury and Chilmark—were quite common
Their descendants would have the combined Deaf heritage of the
Vineyard, some six generations deep, and that of the Henniker Deaf enclave, merely a generation old at that time.
Sandy River Valley, Maine
In the period after the American Revolution, several of the families on
Martha’s Vineyard—among them, Tiltons, Smiths, Mayhews, and Wests
—decided to migrate to southeastern Maine.
Assimilative and Differentiating Societies
the hypothesis that a difference in the genetic basis of the Deaf societies in the two locations is responsible for the difference in the emergence of class consciousness
The hereditary difference between hearing and Deaf people can be
traced to any of numerous genes, most often acting singly. As a result, the
occurrence of Deaf and hearing people in the family tends to follow the
“laws of heredity” first spelled out by Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel in
the mid-nineteenth century (but not widely recognized until the end of
the century). Mendel identified two main patterns of genetic transmission, called dominant and recessive