Most people picture Helen Keller as a helpless child having a breakthrough at a water pump. The FBI pictured a radical threat. This deep dive shatters the polished bronze statue to reconstruct the fiercely intellectual and political woman monitored by her own government for much of her adult life.

Born in 1880 in Alabama to former Confederate elite, she lost her sight and hearing to illness at 19 months. With Anne Sullivan she learned language, mastered the Tadoma method, and became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts. She joined the Socialist Party, helped found the ACLU, and traced blindness to poverty and industrial conditions, drawing vicious public backlash.

• The water pump breakthrough and the Tadoma method of feeling speech
• The Frost King plagiarism accusation and cryptomnesia
• Her socialism ...