Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller

Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller

by Kim E. Nielsen
Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller

Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller

by Kim E. Nielsen

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Overview

A moving portrait of Anne Sullivan Macy, teacher of Helen Keller—and a complex, intelligent woman worthy of her own spotlight

After many years, historian and Helen Keller expert Kim Nielsen realized that she and her peers had failed Anne Sullivan Macy. While Macy is remembered primarily as Helen Keller's teacher and a straightforward educational superhero, the real story of this brilliant, complex, and misunderstood woman has never been completely told. Beyond the Miracle Worker seeks to correct this oversight, presenting a new tale about the wounded but determined woman and her quest for a successful, meaningful life.

Born in 1866 to poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, Macy suffered part of her childhood in the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury. Seeking escape, in love with literature, and profoundly stubborn, she successfully fought to gain an education at the Perkins School for the Blind. She went on to teach Helen Keller, who became a loyal and lifelong friend. As Macy floundered with her own blindness, ill health, depression, and marital strife in her later years, she came to lean on her former student for emotional, physical, and economic support.

Based on privately held primary source material—including materials at both the American Foundation for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind—Beyond the Miracle Worker is revelatory and absorbing, unraveling one of the best known and least understood friendships of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807050507
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication date: 03/01/2010
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kim E. Nielsen is an award-winning educator, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities We the People stipend, a Fulbright lecturer, the author of many journal articles, and frequent public speaker. Her books include Helen Keller: Selected Writings (2005), The Radical Lives of Helen Keller(2004) and Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism and the First Red Scare (2001). She also served as an advisory editor to the forthcomingEncyclopedia of American Disability History (2009). She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she is Professor of History & Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Read an Excerpt

It’s temp ting to begin this book like a fairy tale. Once upon a
(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Beyond the Miracle Worker"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Kim E. Nielsen.
Excerpted by permission of Beacon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Feeding Hills
 
Chapter 2
Tewksbury Almshouse
 
Chapter 3
Perkins, 1880-1885: Part One
 
Chapter 4
Perkins, 1880-1886: Part Two
 
Chapter 5
Becoming a Teacher
 
Chapter 6
Tuscumbia, 1888-1891
 
Chapter 7
The Battle for Helen, Round 1, 1891-1984
 
Chapter 8
The Battle for Helen, Round 2, 1894-1900
 
Chapter 9
Radcliffe, 1900-1904
 
Chapter 10
John, 1904-1914
 
Chapter 11
On the Road, 1914-1924
 
Chapter 12
The American Foundation for the Blind, 1924-1930
 
Chapter 13
Concluding, 1930-1936
 
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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