THE FIRST DEAF HISTORY CLASS at Gallaudet University was offered in the fall of 1986, 122 years after the founding of this university. Professor John Vickrey Van Cleve initially offered the class as a special topics class, but within a few years the class would become a permanent part of the curriculum. HIS 331, History of the American Deaf Community, was created in response to the Deaf President Now movement in 1988 and the publication of A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America in 1989. Both of these events sparked an increased interest in the history of deaf peoples.The early works of deaf history include Jack R. Gannon's Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America (1981); Harlan Lane's When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (1984); and Nora Groce's Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha 's Vineyard (1985), all of which had a significant impact on Van Cleve and Crouch's work. None, however, had more of an influence than Deaf Heritage because Gannon framed deaf people as members of a cultural community with its own schools, newspapers, and organizations. Additionally, the 1987 publication of the Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, also edited by Van Cleve, contained 271 articles that shed further light on deaf individuals, events, and other themes relevant to the study of deaf people. The cumulative early works in deaf history helped give impetus to the creation of an undergraduate class and a textbook on American deaf history.Today the history program at Gallaudet University offers four undergraduate and four graduate courses in deaf history. Other specialized courses in the deaf history program since HIS 331 include History of Mass Media and the American Deaf Community, Nineteenth-Century American Deaf History, and Deaf Women's History. Just steps away from our offices we have access to the world's largest archival collection of works related to deaf people, the Gallaudet University Library Deaf Collections and Arc hives. The archives have the capacity to hold twenty-four thousand containers of letters and other primary documents; they also hold the oldest known book about deaf people, written by Juan Pablo Bonet in 1620. Because of the proximity of the archives and their value for much of the scholarship in deaf history, we create assignments that expose students to the corpus of primary source material available, including correspondence, diaries, photographs, artifacts, films, annual reports, periodicals, and newspapers published by residential schools.The course HIS 331 has become popular on campus. It is offered at least once a year, and depending on demand, it has been offered as often as three times a year. The course attracts quite a diverse group of students, usually with Deaf studies and history majors predominating. It is also a favorite class among visiting students, and many students around the country take the online version of HIS 331 as well. This article uses HIS 331 as a case study of how we approach the teaching of deaf history. The publication of this issue of Sign Language Studies will mark the thirtieth year that HIS 331 has been offered at Gallaudet University. Because we are both deaf ourselves, we use ASL to communicate directly with our students.The course typically reviews deaf history in the United States from 1800 to the Deaf President Now movement. We have experimented with structuring this course chronologically, geographically, thematically, and topically, and we have found a balance between these approaches that seems to work well for students. For example, we might start off with a discussion of pre-eighteenth-century America and deaf education in America before we shift geographically to cover deaf people in antebellum America and some material on the West during Manifest Destiny and, later, the Gold Rush. Notions of community building in the nineteenth century are part of the overarching story, as is the rise of eugenics, oralism, and other issues that challenged the deaf community at the turn of the twentieth century. …