A brilliant woman, headstrong and disabled, Sullivan’s position as Keller’s teacher and companion put her in a category of one. While Wagner can claim that Sanborn is representative of nineteenth-century enlightened New England liberalism, he cannot say that Sullivan was typical of any school of thought or social movement. Throughout his long life, Sanborn believed that the privileged were duty-bound to do right by their less fortunate fellows, and only age (and discouragement following his oldest son’s suicide) kept him from being a major voice of the Progressive Era. Social reformer and outspoken anti-imperialist, he abandoned his lifelong attachment to the Republican Party only at the age of eighty-one, when he voted for Woodrow Wilson. Sanborn was the founder of the American Social Science Association and the Concord School of Philosophy. In 1891, fifteen years after Howe’s death, Sanborn published an adulatory biography of his mentor, Dr. Sanborn joined Howe as a member of the “Secret Six” funders of John Brown and, after Brown’s failed 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry, the two men together avoided arrest by fleeing to Canada. An admirer of Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-76), Sanborn deeply respected Howe’s work as the first director of the Perkins School for the Blind.

Sanborn (1831-1917)-considerably better known in his own time than today-was a younger contemporary of the New England transcendentalists. Disability-Sullivan’s visual impairment and Helen Keller’s deaf-blindness-is responsible for the contacts between Sanborn and Sullivan, but their differences (and commonalities) derive from other sources. The theme of the book is social status and the worldviews that go with it. Published on H-Disability (February, 2014)Ī Strong Radical Woman and the Philanthropic Men Who Knew HerĬan two people, at least one of whom does not fit neatly into any mold, be used to exemplify contrasting social forces? In this delightful book, David Wagner proposes to do just that with Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and Annie Sullivan Macy, even as he points out the pitfalls of such an approach.

The 'Miracle Worker' and the Transcendentalist: Annie Sullivan, Franklin Sanborn, and the Education of Helen Keller.īoulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012.

Annie sullivan the miracle worker