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Nicole Lee Schroeder, Eric C. Nystrom and R. A. R. Edwards. Ordinary Lives: Recovering Deaf Social History Through the American Census., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 526–528, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae611
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In Ordinary Lives: Recovering Deaf Social History Through the American Census, Eric C. Nystrom and R. A. R. Edwards propose a new methodological approach in deaf history. Raising issues with the current state of the field, which tends to center on Deaf cultural institutions (schools, advocacy organizations, and community spaces), they call for more extensive biographical research. In contrast, Ordinary Lives focuses (as the title suggests) on “ordinary deaf people” and the “long-term trends in American history that shaped their lives” (2). Using a combination of social history methods, approaches from digital humanities, and emerging fields like deaf geography, Nystrom and Edwards offer a new approach to the field.
Instead of focusing on overarching changes in deaf education and the rise of Deaf culture in American history, Nystrom and Edwards hope to diversify the subjects of deaf history. Deaf thought leaders tended to be white men, and institutional histories often highlight hearing voices above Deaf voices. While scholars like Nora Ellen Groce, Harlan Lane, Richard Pillard, and Mary French have conducted case studies on Deaf-centric spaces, Nystrom and Edwards find fault with these investigations. These studies place “attention on the non-representative, deaf-centric world,” which was largely inaccessible to the majority of deaf Americans (9). Nystrom and Edwards argue that deaf history heretofore has left out audiologically deaf persons (centering hereditarily deaf persons instead) and has forgotten about deaf people who did not attend major schools like the American School for the Deaf or the New York School for the Deaf. The authors also highlight a temporal gap in the field, noting that deaf history has centered either on the rise of educational opportunities in the early nineteenth century or on the solidification and reclamation of Deaf culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. In contrast, Ordinary Lives revolves on the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time period that is critical to deaf history as it demarcates the rise of oralism and eugenics-centered philosophy spurred by Alexander Graham Bell and others (35–56). Nystrom and Edwards propose using “Deaf Social History” to fill this historiographical gap (10).
