海倫 . 海勒

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was a deafblind American author, activist and lecturer.

Biography

Childhood
Helen Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to parents Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, second cousin of Robert E. Lee. The Keller family originates from Germany. She was not born blind and deaf; it was not until nineteen months of age that she came down with an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which could have possibly been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. By age seven, she had invented over sixty different signs that she could use to communicate with her family. In 1886, her mother Kate Keller was inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf blind child, Laura Bridgman, and traveled to a specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. He put her in touch with local expert Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston, Boston, Massachusetts. The school delegated teacher and former student, Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Helen's teacher. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship.


Helen Keller, age 7Sullivan got permission from Helen's father to isolate the girl from the rest of the family in a little house in their garden. Her first task was to instill discipline in the spoiled girl. Helen's big breakthrough in communication came one day when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on her palm, while running cool water over her palm from a pump, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world (including her prized doll). In 1890, ten-year-old Helen Keller was introduced to the story of Ragnhild Kåta - a deaf blind Norwegian girl who had learned to speak. Ragnhild Kåta's success inspired Helen — she wanted to learn to speak as well. Anne was able to teach Helen to speak using the Tadoma method (touching the lips and throat of others as they speak) combined with "fingerspelling" alphabetical characters on the palm of Helen's hand. Later, Keller would also learn to read English, French, German, Greek, and Latin in Braille.

Education

Helen Keller and her teacher Anne SullivanIn 1888, Helen attended the Perkins School for the Blind. In 1894, Helen and Anne moved to New York City to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896 they returned to Massachusetts and Helen entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College, where Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleton Rogers paid for her education. In 1904 at the age of 24, Helen graduated from Radcliffe magna cum laude, becoming the first deaf and blind person to graduate from a college.

Helen went on to become a world famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, as well as numerous causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, and a birth control supporter. In 1915 she founded Helen Keller International, a non-profit organization for preventing blindness. In 1920 she helped to found the ACLU. Helen and Anne Sullivan traveled all over the world to over 39 countries, and made several trips to Japan, becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Helen Keller met every U.S.