This week, Any grade school student can tell you that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But that’s not how Bell would have described his career. He saw himself as a teacher, specifically a teacher of deaf children. However, even though he was raised by a deaf mother and married a deaf woman, many deaf people to this day see Bell as an enemy. He was an oralist, meaning he thought the only way to teach deaf children to succeed in society was to teach them how to speak, and the keep them from learning sign language. This is the story Katie Booth tells in her new book “The Invention of Miracles – Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness.” Booth is a freelance author and part time writing instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. She was also raised in a mixed hearing/deaf family.

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