| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Deaf History Reader. Ed. by John Vickrey Van Cleve. (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 2007. viii, 217 pp. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-56368-359-6.)

Because schools for the deaf were the battlegrounds on which the bitter war over sign language was waged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, histories of the deaf in America have naturally focused on the intersection of language and education in that period. (This review follows the practice of most scholars, using the lowercase "deaf" to refer to the auditory condition of not hearing and the uppercase "Deaf" to refer to nonhearing people who share a language—for example, American Sign Language—and a culture.) Thanks to the important work of historians such as Harlan Lane and Douglas C. Baynton—and also to the sporadic but widely reported political activism of students and faculty at Gallaudet University—the broad outlines of the story have become familiar: the flowering of "manualist" schools for the deaf and with them Deaf communities and cultural institutions in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by the occasionally brutal suppression of sign language by hearing educators convinced of the social, political, and eugenic benefits of orally based language. The carefully researched essays brought together by John Vickrey Van Cleve in The Deaf History Reader aim to expand, deepen, and, in some cases, complicate this history.

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