[access-uk] Re: Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
- From: "Christine Weetman" <goatmum@xxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:01:06 +0100
May I hear the audio clip also? I really would Love to, where did you find
it? Thanks, Christine W.----- Original Message -----
From: "Angel" <Angel238@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 4:47 PM
Subject: [access-uk] Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
Just five comments I have to preface this article. Helen Keller's speech
was understandable. I have an example on my computer. I have a 1915
recording of her saying her first spoken sentence. Anne Sullivan says in
this audio clip, Helen wondered how it was people could speak to each other
without signing. It was explained we speak using our mouths. Helen wanted
to learn to speak in this way as well. Her first sentence was "I am not
dumb now." It is understandable to anyone who listens. I heard her speak
in the mid 60's on a television program and it seemed to me she spoke French
more understandably than she did English. Eugene V. Debs almost
became president in 1912. Think of the country we would have today if he
had succeeded. Thirdly, Helen Keller said in "The Story of my Life" pat
garret's daughter was also a strong independent blind woman traveling
everywhere alone before there was organized mobility instruction or Dog
guide schools. The two women were personal friends. Further, even with all
these technological assists of which we are all so proud how many children
today, blind, or sighted, black , white, or other, have even an elementary
understanding of Shakespeare Homer,or Longfellow. Lastly, and I have been
meaning to ask the question since I first heard of George Belle. George,
are you related to Alexander Graham Belle?
Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
> AmericanHeritage.com, USA
> Thursday, April 05, 2007
>
> Helen Keller's Amazing Breakthrough-And Life
>
> By David Rapp
>
> Caption: Helen Keller when she was seven. (Bettmann/Corbis)
>
> As you may remember from William Gibson's 1959 play The Miracle Worker and
> the movie based on it, Helen Keller was an Alabama girl who was struck
> blind and deaf by illness in her infancy but learned to communicate when
> she was only six, with the help of her devoted teacher Annie Sullivan. In
> the play's climactic scene, the little girl makes a connection between
> water running from a pump and the word water spelled out in sign language
> on her palm. The remarkable events of that day, April 5, 1887-120 years
> ago today-end most people's knowledge of Helen Keller's life. The rest of
> her story, however, is hardly less inspiring.
>
> In The Miracle Worker Keller vocalizes what sounds like "wah-wah."
> Actually she probably didn't speak right then, and she never fully
> mastered understandable speech, but her recognition at that moment of the
> connection between words and objects was a huge breakthrough. "Suddenly I
> felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten-a thrill of returning
> thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me," she
> later wrote.
>
> In fact, according to a letter Annie Sullivan wrote, the same day she
> learned the word water she "added thirty new words to her vocabulary,"
> including door, open, shut, give, go, and come. "She has learned that
> everything has a name," Sullivan wrote. She learned at a breakneck pace.
> Within a week she was understanding simple sentences, and within a month
> she knew about 100 words. Within a year, she was familiar with plays by
> Shakespeare and poetry by Homer and Longfellow. It was an astounding
> achievement for a small child who had been imprisoned by her lack of both
> vision and hearing.
>
> Fame quickly followed, particularly after a glowing report about her in
> 1888 by Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution for the
> Blind in Massachusetts, where the visually impaired Sullivan had been both
> a student and a teacher. Around that time, Helen Keller met Alexander
> Graham Bell, whose own mother and wife were deaf and who had invented the
> telephone partly to serve as a hearing aid. Bell and Keller became
> lifelong friends, and they wrote each other often over the years.
>
> Soon she was writing more than letters. A fairy tale she wrote in 1891,
> when she was 11, "The Frost King," was published in numerous publications
> before it was discovered to be an unconscious retelling of a story she had
> read in a children's book. The humiliating error nearly kept her from
> writing again, but she eventually reconsidered. By the end of her life she
> had written 14 books and dozens of magazine articles.
>
> In her teens she became friends with Mark Twain, and they wrote many droll
> letters to each other. He admired her enormously, even comparing her to
> Joan of Arc. Once he offered to teach her billiards, a favorite pastime of
> his. "Oh, Mr. Clemens," she responded. "It takes sight to play billiards."
> "Not the kind of billiards we play around here," he said.
>
> She attended a number of schools, studying French, German, literature,
> philosophy, and a host of other subjects, until she was admitted to
> Radcliffe in 1900, when she was 20. She paid for college with money raised
> by Twain's personal appeal to the Standard Oil magnate Henry Huddleston
> Rogers. While at Radcliffe, she wrote her bestselling autobiography, The
> Story of My Life, though she was barely in her third decade. She graduated
> magna cum laude in 1904, the first blind and deaf person ever to graduate
> from any college.
>
> Around that time, Sullivan married a Harvard instructor named John Macy,
> who had helped edit Keller's autobiography. He was a dedicated socialist,
> and Keller took up the cause enthusiastically and publicly. "I am the
> determined foe of the capitalist system, which denies the workers the
> rights of human beings," she wrote in 1912. "I consider it fundamentally
> wrong, radically unjust and cruel." She supported the Socialist party
> candidate Eugene V. Debs in his presidential campaigns. She also avidly
> supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
> writing the nascent organization a $100 check and an impassioned letter of
> support in 1916. Both these stances angered her conservative Southern
> family, as well as many others across the nation who had previously seen
> her as simply a saintly handicapped girl.
>
> She often flouted expectations in a time when few women, disabled or not,
> ventured far outside the home. Throughout her life, with the assistance of
> Sullivan, she traveled to promote causes she believed in, and she visited
> 39 countries in all. She supported woman suffrage, better health care for
> women and children, and especially increased opportunities for people with
> disabilities. For 40 years she raised funds for the American Foundation
> for the Blind. She met with 13 Presidents, and in 1964, when she was 84,
> President Lyndon Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
> one of the highest honors an American civilian can receive. She died in
> 1968 at 87, more than 80 years after the day she learned the word water.
>
> Without question, that day in April 1887 was an extraordinary one. But
> Helen Keller's whole life was impressive.
>
> -David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology
> Review, and Out.
>
>
>
http://www.americanheritage.com/people/articles/web/20070405-helen-keller-annie-sullivan-socialists-feminism.shtml
>
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