WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - This Week in Western Civilization: April 13-19

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

This week, Olivia Finch discusses the anniversaries of the birth of Anne Sullivan, the death of Rosalind Franklin, and the publication of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language.

Welcome to this week in Western Civilization on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Olivia Finch, bringing new snapshots of history in context. Hello, everyone. Today we'll be covering one important birth, one important death, and one notable event that happened between April 12th and April 18th in Western Civ. On April 10th, 1936, American teacher Anne Sullivan was born in, in Feeding Hills, Agawam, Massachusetts. Sullivan is best known for being the instructor and lifelong companion of Helen Keller, who is totally blind and deaf,

teaching her how to speak, read in Braille, write, and type by means of a system in which Sullivan spelled letters into Keller's palm. The play The Miracle Worker chronicles the story of Sullivan's tutoring of Keller. After her seventh lesson, she was able to speak the sentence word by word, I am not dumb now. On April 16th, 1958, English chemist and x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin died of bronchonamonia and ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in London, England. Franklin is also known as the Dark Lady of DNA, as her contributions to the work on uncovering

the structure of DNA were both incredibly substantial and left almost entirely uncredited during her lifetime. Had Franklin not died prematurely, fellow scientist James Watson believed she would have eventually won a Nobel prize for her work. On April 15, 75, English writer and polymath Samuel Johnson published his book A Dictionary of the English Language, which she worked on for nine years. It is now considered one of the most important texts in the history of the English language, and was considered the preeminent English Dictionary until the Oxford English Dictionary was first published in 1884. It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good, to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise,

to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries. You've been listening to This Week in Western Civilization with Olivia Finch on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you next week.