27 June: Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born on this date in 1880. Here are 10 facts about her.

1. Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her father was the editor of a local newspaper who had previously served in the Confederate Army during the US Civil War. One of her ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Helen's comment about this coincidence in her autobiography was "there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."
2. She wasn't born deaf and blind. She became so at the age of 19 months after an illness which doctors of the time described as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain”. It's thought what she had was probably Scarlet Fever or Meningitis, both treatable nowadays. As Helen started to recover, her parents realised he had lost her sight and hearing.
3. She narrowly escaped being placed in an institution. As a small child she was prone to tantrums and erratic behaviour, and some of her relatives recommended she be hospitalised. Luckily for Helen, her parents didn't want to do that. Instead, they took her to Julian John Chisolm, Professor of Diseases of the Eye and Ear at the University of Maryland. He recommended that she see a man who had had founded schools for deaf children as his wife was deaf. The man was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. He suggested she went to a school for the blind. It was through the school that she met Anne Sullivan, who was mentored by Bell. The three became lifelong friends.
4. Anne became Helen's teacher on March 3, 1887. Helen would later describe this as the day her life changed and her "soul was born". Anne, visually impaired herself, had only just graduated from school. She famously began teaching Helen words by spelling them out on her palm. It didn't look as if it was going to work, at first, as Anne used objects like a doll and a mug, but when Anne famously took Helen outside and held her hand under the Water pump while spelling “w-a-t-e-r” into Helen’s palm, Helen got the message and asked for the word for "earth". She went on to learn 30 words that day.
5. She was the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. Anne would attend with her to interpret the lectures and texts. She wrote her autobiography during her junior year.
6. Helen wrote 14 books and 500 articles during her life, but she only had one attempt at writing fiction, when she was eleven. She wrote a short story called The Frost King, which was published in her school's magazine and a journal on deaf-blind education. When someone pointed out the similarities between Helen's story and another called Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby, Helen was accused of plagiarism and interrogated by her teachers for two hours. Although it was finally decided by a narrow vote that Helen had not deliberately copied the story, she never wrote fiction again. It's thought Helen may have had Canby's story read to her at some stage and although she'd forgotten it, it was still there in her subconscious.
7. Another of her lifelong friends was Mark Twain, who she met at the age of 14. She wrote that "he treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” She would recognise him by his scent, for, as a smoker, he often smelled of tobacco. It was Mark Twain who convinced the industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers to help pay for Keller’s education, and he was also the first person to call Anne Sullivan a miracle worker.
8. When she was 36, she fell in love and almost married. Peter Fagan worked as Helen's secretary for a while when Anne Sullivan was ill. They secretly got engaged, took out a marriage licence and tried to elope three times. Her family, believing only they could look after her properly, and that she might pass on her disabilities to any children she had, forbade her to marry. “If I could see, I would marry first of all,” she wrote.
9. She had political views way ahead of her time. She belonged to the Socialist Party, helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), supported industrial workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, birth control (she expressed concerns about human overpopulation), and refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe disabilities. She was also an admirer of Vladimir Lenin. Her left wing views resulted in her being investigated by the FBI. She travelled the world advocating for rights and education for deaf, blind and disabled people - she visited 39 countries and met with world leaders. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. In the 1920s, she even went on tour of the Vaudeville circuit, where she would, with Anne's help, speak to audiences and answer their questions.
10. She learned to communicate, not only by means of spelling words on palms, but by touching people's lips, reading Braille, and typing. She learned to speak, but never liked her voice as her speech was hard for others to understand. She even found a way to appreciate Music, by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop.

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