This Day In History...

From The History Channel:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HELEN KELLER DIES:
June 1, 1968

On June 1, 1968, Helen Keller dies in Westport, Connecticut, at the age of 87.
Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller circumvented her disabilities to become a
world-renowned writer and lecturer.Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880,
on a farm near Tuscumbia, Alabama. A normal infant, she was stricken with an
illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For
the next four years, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child. Special
education for the blind and deaf was just beginning at the time, and it was not
until after Helen's sixth birthday that her parents had her examined by an eye
physician interested in the blind. He referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham
Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the
deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the
Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.The teacher, 20-year-old Anne
Sullivan, was partially blind. At Perkins, she had been instructed how to teach
a blind and deaf student to communicate using a hand alphabet signaled by touch
into the student's palm. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March 1887 and
immediately set about teaching this form of sign language to Helen. Although she
had no knowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection of spoken
language, Helen learned her first word within days: "water." Keller later
described the experience: "I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool
something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave
it light, hope, joy, set it free."Under Sullivan's dedicated guidance, Keller
learned at a staggering rate. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than
a dozen words a day, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using
raised words on cardboard. By the end of the month, she was reading complete
stories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visit to the
Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spent several
winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann
School for the Deaf. Keller learned to imitate the position of Fuller's lips and
tongue in speech, and how to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and
throat of the speaker. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as
Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.When she was 14,
Keller entered the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. Two
years later, with Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, she enrolled
at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. In 1900, she was
accepted into Radcliffe, a prestigious women's college in Cambridge with classes
taught by Harvard University faculty. She was a determined and brilliant
student, and while still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My
Life, was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and then as a book. In
1904, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe.Keller became an accomplished
writer, publishing, among other books, The World I Live In (1908), Out of the
Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and Teacher
(1955). In 1913, she began lecturing, with the aid of an interpreter, primarily
on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. Her lecture tours took her
several times around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas and
ignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which historically had often
resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums. Helen Keller was
also outspoken in other areas and supported socialism all her life. For her work
on behalf of the blind and the deaf, she was widely honored and in 1964 was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor,
by President Lyndon B. Johnson."My life has been happy because I have had
wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do," Helen Keller once
wrote, adding, "I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad.
Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a
breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content."

------------------------------------------------------------------

Why is this so important to me I'd post about it? Because I have always admired Helen Keller...she is one of my heroes. I am totally awed by everything she accomplished in spite of not being able to hear or to see.