June 27 · This Day in America
She arrives healthy in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of a Confederate veteran and an educated mother. Before her second birthday an illness takes her sight and her hearing, sealing her into a silence the world assumed was final. It was not. At the water pump, with teacher Anne Sullivan spelling letters into her palm, a single word breaks through and the entire universe of language rushes in behind it. Keller becomes the first deafblind person in America to earn a college degree, graduating from Radcliffe. She writes books, learns to speak, and spends a long life arguing for the blind, for workers, for women's suffrage, and for the simple radical idea that a mind no one could reach was a whole world all along. She receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Few Americans have done more to widen the country's sense of who counts as fully alive.
Source: www.womenshistory.org
Also on this day · 1844
Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum are held in the jail at Carthage, Illinois, awaiting trial. In the late afternoon a mob of roughly two hundred men, faces blackened with gunpowder, storms the building and kills them both. Smith was thirty-eight. The killing scatters and then galvanizes his followers, who within three years set out on the long road to the Great Salt Lake and build a faith that endures.
Source: scripturecentral.org
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903