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Editor'S rnrroductlon he study of the history of Deaf communities is a recent phenomenon. Until deaf people were first brought together in significant numbers for the purpose of education, there was little note taken of their groups and no means for Deaf people themselves to preserve knowledge of their daily lives. Some literate cultures left a record of the legal status of and popular attitudes toward deaf individuals, but only with the advent of large-scale education of deaf students was information about Deaf communities and the perspectives of Deaf people saved for future generations. This section contains papers that take a variety of approaches to the history of Deaf communities. Some present the views of majority cultures toward the deaf people in their midst. Venetta Lampropoulou draws on historical sources from ancient Greece, finding attitudes ranging from Athenian acceptance of deaf people and sign language to Spartan disdain for deaf people. (Whatever the conditions of deaf people's lives, large-scale education of deaf students would not appear in Greece until the twentieth century.) Abraham Zwiebel describes the status of deaf people under Jewish law, citing ancient texts to support his view of Judaism as a system of laws with a long tradition of respect for deaf people. According to Zwiebel, deaf people as early as the first century A.D. had achieved high social and economic status in Jewish society, and there is evidence of education of deaf students throughout Jewish history. In many countries, the source of significant historical information about deaf people begins with the founding of large schools for deaf students. Among the earliest of these were the state-run institutions founded in France after the French Revolution. Papers by Alexis Karacostas and Anne T. Quartararo describe Revolutionary French efforts to provide aid and education to deaf people, and the effect of these efforts on the acceptance of Deaf culture in French society. Bernard Truffaut examines the French Deaf community of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding progress in many areas but also a damaging divisiveness over the issue of educational method. While the history of Deaf communities and the history of deaf education are two separate topics, at times they are so intertwined as to be inseparable. The gathering of large numbers of deaf students in residential schools is often noted as a critical early step in the formation of Deaf linguistic and cultural communities. In countries where such schools were founded relatively recently, a study of educational institutions and methods may hold important keys to understanding Deaf communities in their early stages of development. Several papers in this section are concerned with the history of education of deaf students in Italy (Serena Corazza, Paola Pinna, et al.), Spain (Susan Plann), Puerto Rico (Yolanda Rodriguez Fraticelli), Nigeria (Emmanuel Ojile), and Saudi Arabia (Zaid Abdulla AI-Muslat). In countries with a longer history of educating deaf students, too, exploration of school records and analyses of competing educational theories can yield benefits for those seeking to understand both Deaf communities and the mainstream cultures in Editor's Introduction which they reside. Barry Crouch finds in the records of the American School for the Deaf a rich, and largely unexplored, source of information on the education of deaf students in the early years of the United States and insight into the emergence of the United States Deaf community. Gunther List examines the tradition of oralism in the Germanspeaking countries, explaining not only its devastating effect on Deaf communities, but also the social and economic conditions that led to its century-long dominance and the changes that have led to its decline. Where Deaf communities have flourished, they have often left records of their activities that benefit both historians and subsequent generations of Deaf people. Based on the records of associations of Deaf people in Denmark, Jonna Widell constructs a theory of the development of the Danish Deaf community comprising three phases: Opening (in which Deaf people form associations and are accepted by hearing society); Isolation (in which oralism leads to societal rejection of Deaf culture and sign language); and the current stage, Manifestation (in which Deaf people emerge from isolation to exert an influence on educational policy and the political process). Robert Buchanan and John B. Christiansen describe in their papers two Deaf vocational communities: the Deaf industrial workforce of Akron, Ohio and Deaf printers, respectively. They draw on a rich store of information on Deaf people in the twentieth-century United States, including...

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