Keller

"Helen Keller." //Contemporary Heroes and Heroines//. Vol. 1. Gale, 1990. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 15 Feb. 2012
 * Helen Keller was born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
 * She was an author, lecturer, and social activist.
 * In February of 1882, Helen had a sudden sever fever, and the doctors called it "acute congestion of the brain and stomach". The doctor did not believe that the child would live long. The fever left as suddenly as it had occured, but Helen was blind and deaf.
 * Her childhood behavior was wild, as she had only a limited system of signs to request what she wanted and she was often frustrated by her inability to communicate like the rest of the world.
 * Anne Sullivan, blind herself from an eye disease, was sent to the Keller home to work with Helen. She spelt objects in Helen's one hand while she used Helen's other hand for her to feel the object being spelt. This wasnt effective until she spelt out water, which is an famous story.
 * Little by little, Keller learned to express herself through the manual alphabet and to read Braille
 * After learning about a blind and deaf Norwegain girl who learned how to speak, Keller immediately resolved to learn to speak. Sullivan took her to Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Keller made remarkable progress and eventually learned to speak French and German as well as English. While attending the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, Keller also studied history, mathematics, literature, astronomy, and physics. Her determination to possess as much knowledge as possible took her to Radcliffe College, from which she graduated, cum laude, in 1904.
 * Keller's triumph over ignorance was followed by her triumph over public indifference to the welfare of the handicapped. She devoted the rest of her life to the promotion of social reforms aimed at bettering the education and treatment of the blind, the deaf, the mute, and, in effect, all handicapped individuals. The recipient of innumerable humanitarian awards and citations, Keller is credited with prompting the organization of many state commissions for the blind. Her efforts were also very influential in putting an end to the practice of committing the deaf and the blind to mental asylums. In addition, she was a pioneer in informing the public in the prevention of blindness of the newborn. Her candid articles in the Kansas City Star and Ladies' Home Journal were among the very first public discussions of venereal disease and its relationship to newborn blindness. Keller carried her campaign to improve the condition of the handicapped throughout the world, completing several extensive lecture tours in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa. Keller in universally recognized as one of the foremost humanitarians of the century.
 * Sullivan assisted Keller all through her school and college days, manually spelling the lectures and reading assignments into Keller's palm. Later, she accompanied Keller on her lecture tours, giving full support to her pupil and their joint cause of aiding the handicapped. The partnership was ended only at Sullivan's death in 1936.
 * Works Cited**

"Keller, Helen Adams (1880-1968)." //Encyclopedia of World Biography//. Detroit: Gale, 1998. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.
 * When Helen was 6, her mother heard of the pioneer work being done at the Perkins Institution in Massachusetts for teaching deaf and blind people to communicate. In March 1887, Anne Sullivan, a product of the institution.
 * By the time she was 16, Keller had passed the admissions examinations for Radcliffe College; in 1904 she graduated cum laude. As a young woman, she became determined to learn about the world, and to improve the lives of others. With insight, energy, and deep devotion to humanity, she lectured throughout the world, lobbied in Congress, and wrote thousands of letters asking for contributions to finance efforts to improve the welfare of the blind. She visited hospitals and helped blind soldiers. She taught the blind to be courageous and to make their lives rich, productive, and beautiful for others and for themselves.
 * Works Cited**

Born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, United States. Died June 1, 1968 in Westport, Connecticut, United States. "Helen Adams Keller." //Almanac of Famous People//. Gale, 2011. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.
 * Works Cited**

*Inspirational Example. Helen Keller overcame both blindness and deafness, providing inspiration to many people around the world. She devoted her life to bettering the education and treatment of the blind, the deaf, and the mute, and was a pioneer in educating the public in the prevention of blindness in newborns. *Social Reformer. After conquering her own limitations, Keller's next battle was the public's indifference to the welfare of the disabled. She devoted the rest of her life to promoting social reforms aimed at bettering the education and treatment of the blind, the deaf, the mute--in effect, many physically challenged people. Keller won many awards and citations for her humanitarian work. Credited with prompting the organization of state commissions for the blind, she helped put a stop to placing deaf and blind individuals in mental asylums. As a pioneer in educating the public in the prevention of blindness of the newborn, she wrote newspaper and magazine articles about the relationship between venereal disease and blindness in newborn infants. She traveled to Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa lecturing about the need to improve the lives of disabled people. In 1929 Keller wrote the second volume of her autobiography, Midstream: My Later Life.
 * she described her illness: "They called it acute congestion of the stomach and the fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. There was great rejoicing in the family that morning, but none, not even the doctor, knew that I should never see or hear again."

"Helen Keller." //American Decades//. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Detroit: Gale, 1998. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 15 Feb. 2012

*Keller, Helen Adams (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968), author and lecturer, was born in Tuscumbia, Ala., the daughter of Arthur H. Keller, a gentleman farmer and former captain in the Confederate army, and Kate Adams. Works Cited "Helen Adams Keller." //Dictionary of American Biography//. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
 * Until she was seven years old, Keller had no formal instruction. She did not speak, read, or write. She devised a number of manual signs to communicate with her family and developed a large repertoire of antisocial behaviors. Her parents, on learning of Samuel Gridley Howe's success years before with another deaf-blind girl, Laura Bridgman, contacted the Perkins Institution for the Blind. In 1887, Michael Anagnos, who had succeeded Howe as director at Perkins, recommended a recent graduate, Anne Sullivan, to become Keller's tutor.
 * The enthusiastic writings of Anagnos and of other luminaries such as Alexander Graham Bell and Edward Everett Hale, who claimed distant kinship with her, made Keller a celebrity before she was ten years of age. On a visit to the Northeast in 1888, Keller met President Grover Cleveland, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier. She also met Laura Bridgman, Howe's famous pupil, who was over fifty at the time and whom Keller would soon supplant as the best-known deaf-blind person in the world.
 * From 1894 to 1895, Keller attended the Wright-Humason School in New York City, where she sharpened her lipreading skills (she read lips by placing her hand over the speaker's mouth) and tried to improve her recently acquired speech. From 1896 to 1897, Keller attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, to prepare for Radcliffe College. She also studied for two years with a private tutor before passing the admissions examinations in 1899 and entering Radcliffe in 1900. She graduated in 1904 with a B.A. cum laude. Although Sullivan accompanied Keller to every class as an interpreter, she was barred from attending Keller's examinations--a procedure that largely silenced those who scoffed at Keller's achieving the degree on her own merits.
 * In all, Keller published fourteen books. A count of articles printed in journals, newspapers, and magazines would extend into the hundreds. In addition to autobiography, she wrote on political, social, and educational issues.
 * In 1909, Keller joined the Socialist party. It suited her desire to bring justice to all people, with special attention to those who were deaf, blind, or mentally retarded. An active party member, she wrote and spoke in favor of Socialist principles and even considered running for office. On the eve of World War I, however, she resigned from the Socialist party, whose methods she regarded as too slow to achieve the changes for which she fought, and joined the Industrial Workers of the World. She also became a leading figure in the suffragist movement, serving that cause with essays, lectures, and personal appeals to politicians. Following World War I and the victory for woman's suffrage, Keller's political activities slowly came to a halt, partly because they interfered with her writing and lecturing. Keller remained outside politics until 1944, when she campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term.
 * In 1924 the American Foundation for the Blind sought Keller's assistance in raising funds for its information and scientific programs. For the next three years, Keller and Sullivan undertook meetings patterned after their vaudeville turn, generating great enthusiasm, raising considerable funds for the foundation, and providing them with modest recompense. Most of Keller's audiences overlooked her political stance when she was pleading the cause of blind people, an attitude she encouraged by becoming less and less outspoken politically.
 * Among the many honors Keller received were honorary doctorates from Glasgow, Harvard (its first to a woman), and Temple universities, and decorations from many governments, including one personally given to her by the king of Yugoslavia and another from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. France made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
 * For her generation and for generations to come, Keller affirmed that life, even for the severely handicapped, could still be worth living. Without exception, those who knew her found most impressive her unfailing enthusiasm for life. Hers was a spectacular achievement against formidable odds.


 * "Helen Keller holds a special place among American heroes. No one else is quite like her. She could not hear. She could not see. When she spoke, she could barely be understood. Yet she learned to live and express her thoughts and feelings in a world of sight and sound. She showed that the disabled, as she put it, could live "naturally and ... be treated as human beings.""
 * Helen Keller loved to travel. Her efforts to imporve conditions for the blind and deaf-blind took her to every corner of the globe. From 1901 to 1957, Helen visited thrity-nine countries on six continents.
 * "Suddenly, I felt (as if) somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' mean the cool wondrful something that was flowing over my hand.