Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to Kate Adams and newspaper editor and Confederate Army Captain, Arthur H. Keller. 

Helen lost her sight and hearing at 19 months, probably from scarlet fever or meningitis. 

When she was seven years old, she met her first teacher and life-long companion, Anne Sullivan. The radical teacher taught her language skills, including reading and writing. 

As a child, she developed her own sign language to communicate with her parents, then learned to lip-read by putting her fingers on the lips of the person to whom she was talking.

She attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University, she became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 

Helen Keller portrait, 1904.

At the turn of the 20th century blindness was a forbidden subject in women's magazines because so many cases were related to venereal disease. However after Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904, she became a crusader for the handicapped. 

Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind for many years, during which time she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the world.

Helen Keller was a regular visitor to the White House and met with every US president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B Johnson. 

Her friends included Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. 

A leftist political activist and women's suffragist, Keller ended up being investigated by the FBI most of her adult life. 

A prolific author, she wrote 12 books and hundreds of speeches including her 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life, detailing her early life and childhood education with Anne Sullivan.

The Miracle Worker was a 1962 American biographical movie about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Both actresses won Academy Awards. 

Helen Keller was an avid dog enthusiast and almost always owned one during her life including a pit bull named "Sir Thomas."

The first of the Akita dog breed to be introduced to the United States was one named Kamikaze-go, who was given to Helen Keller as a gift after she visited the prefecture of Akita in Japan in 1937.

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home,  Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday.

Her June 27 birthday is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in Pennsylvania.