Helen Keller

[0:05 am, 21/05/2022] 

  Helen Keller was an American educator, advocate for the visually and hearing impaired, and co-founder of the ACLU. When she was two, she suffered from illness, and Keller was  blind and deaf. From 1887, her teacher, Anne Sullivan, helped her improve her communication skills significantly, and Keller graduated from college in 1904. She received many honors throughout her life for her achievements

.Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Keller was the first of two daughters born to Arthur H. Keller and Catherine Adam Skeller. Keller's father was an officer of the South Army during the Civil War. She also had two older brothers-in-law.

Keller was born visually and audibly, and she started speaking at the age of six months. She started walking at the age of one. When she was two years old, Keller lost both her sight and hearing in just 19 months. In 1882, she became ill with a illness called "brain fever" by her doctor, and her temperature rose. Some experts believe she may have had scarlet fever or meningitis, but the essence of the disease remains a mystery to this day.

As Keller grew up as a child, she developed a limited way of communicating with her companion, the young daughter of her family cook, Martha Washington. The two made a kind of sign language. By the time Keller was seven, they  invented more than 60 signs to communicate with each other.

 

Keller was also very wild and out of control during this time. She kicked and shouted when she was angry, and laughed uncontrollably when she was happy. She afflicted Martha and threw an angry tantrum at her parents. Many families felt that it should be 

institutionalized.

She was inspected by Alexander Graham Bell at the age of six. He then sent  her a 20-year-old teacher of the Perkins Blind Society in Boston, Anne Sullivan (Macy), who was the tutor of Bell's son-in-law. Her prominent teacher, Sullivan, stayed in Keller from March 1887 until her death in October 1936.

Within a few months, Keller felt something, associated it with a word spelled out in her palm with a finger sign, felt the word floating on the cardboard, read the sentence, and placed the word in the frame to form her own sentence. I learned to do. From 1888 to 1890, she spent the winter studying Braille at the Perkins Institute. Then she slowly began to learn to talk to Sarah Fuller at the Hollesman School for the Deaf in Boston. She also learned to read her lips by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of her speaker and at the same time her words were  spelled for her.

Keller began writing about blindness after developing unparalleled skills for similar disabled people. This is taboo in women's magazines because it is often associated with venereal diseases. Edward W. Bock accepted  articles from the Ladies' Home Journal, followed by other major journals, Century, McClure, and The Atlantic Monthly.

She wrote "The Story of My Life" (1903), "Optimism" (1903), "The World I Live in" (1908), "The Light of My Religion" (1927), "Helen Keller". Keller's Diary (1938), Opened Door (1957). In 1913, she began her lectures (with the help of an interpreter) primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, and later established a $ 2 million donation fund, and her lecture tours made her around the world. In 1920 she founded the American Civil Liberties Union with American civil rights activist Roger Nash Baldwin and others. Her efforts to improve the treatment of the hearing and visually impaired helped to eliminate the disabled from the asylum center. She also urged the organization of committees for the visually impaired in 30 states by 1937.

Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, became the basis for the 1957 television drama The Miracle Worker. In 1959, the story evolved into a Broadway play of the same name, starring Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Sullivan. The two actresses also played these roles in the film adaptation of the award-winning 1962 play.

Throughout her life, she received many honors for her achievements, including the 1936 Theodore Roosevelt Military Medal of Honor, the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and  the 1965 Women's Hall of Fame.

Keller died in sleep on June 1, 1968, just weeks before her 88th birthday. Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the rest of her life at her home in Connecticut.

Throughout her amazing life, Keller was a powerful example of how her determination, diligence, and imagination enable a person to overcome adversity.