On June 27, 1880, Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. An illness at 19 months left her deaf and blind. She grew up in a world without language until, at age 6, Anne Sullivan arrived.

What Sullivan did over the following months is a documented miracle of pedagogy: she reached a child who had no way to connect symbols to meanings, who communicated only through physical demands and tantrums, and taught her that everything has a name.

The famous moment — water flowing over one hand as Anne spelled W-A-T-E-R into the other — happened at a water pump on April 5, 1887. Keller later described it as the moment the world opened.

Keller went on to graduate from Radcliffe College cum laude, the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor's degree. She wrote fourteen books, traveled the world, and became one of the most famous people of the 20th century.

She was also a socialist, a suffragist, and a fierce critic of capitalism, war, and racial injustice. These positions are almost never mentioned in the children's-book version of her life.

Anne Sullivan's contribution to Keller's life — which was total, lifelong, and physically exhausting — is routinely treated as a footnote to Keller's story. Sullivan went blind herself late in life, having damaged her eyesight teaching Keller to read.