ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the recent history of deaf people to show how disability studies as a field will need to acknowledge that different disabilities have their own histories, each defined by unique trajectories. During the latter half of the 20th century, growing numbers of Americans with disabilities resisted their relegation to social invalidity. This activism led in the 1980s and 1990s to criticism of and then protests against the telethons. Beginning in 1817, America embarked on a prolonged effort of building asylums and institutions specifically for deaf children, an impulse that continued until 1953. Though deaf theater has been a mainstay of the community since its earliest history, the first professional national deaf theater was founded in 1967. As they began to tour the country performing their brand of sign language theater, the deaf actors were accompanied onstage by hearing actors, who spoke the lines simultaneously in English.
