Michael Anagnos

Michael Anagnos (1837-1906) was a Greek-American educator who emigrated from Papingo, in the Ottoman Empire, to the United States around 1868 and settled in Boston. He became the second director of the Perkins School for the Blind, succeeding his father-in-law and mentor Samuel Gridley Howe. Under Anagnos, Perkins devised a kindergarten program to teach blind and deaf children and built a new campus in Jamaica Plain, Boston. He is most widely remembered for mentoring Anne Sullivan, the teacher he sent to work with a young deaf-blind girl named Helen Keller; that placement led directly to Keller's education, culminating in her becoming the first deaf-blind woman to earn a bachelor's degree. Anagnos also published scholarly work on the education of the blind, helped found Greek-American civic organizations, and received an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1892.