Miracle Worker and the Transcendentalist Annie Sullivan, Franklin Sanborn, and the Education of Helen Keller

Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, remain two of the best-known American women. But few people know how Sullivan came to her role as teacher of the deaf and blind Keller. Contrasting their lives with Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the era's prominent abolitionist, this book sheds light on the gender and disability expectations that affected the public perception of Sullivan and Keller. This book provides a fascinating insight into class, ethnicity, gender, and disability issues in the Gilded Age and Progressive-Era America.

Introduction; prologue Sanborn’s Younger Days, 1831–1865; Chapter 1 The Post–Civil War North; Chapter 2 “Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Sanborn, I Want to Go to School!”; Chapter 3 Yankee Administrators and Irish Populism; Chapter 4 Keller and Sullivan; Chapter 5 The Attack on Keller and Sullivan in the Early Twentieth Century; Chapter 6 Progressivism and Radicalism in the 1910s; Chapter 7 Generations, Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Disability in the Conflict; epilogue Keller and Sullivan Macy’s Later Years, 1917–1968;

DAVID WAGNER is a Professor of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Southern Maine. He is a longtime activist with the poor, homeless people, and other disenfranchised populations. He is the author of six books including the C. Wright Mills award-winning Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community and, most recently, Ordinary People: In and Out of Poverty in the GildedAge about the lives of inmates at the Massachusetts State Almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. His book The Rise and Fall of Homelessness as a Public Problem 1979–2009 is forthcoming in 2012.