(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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Michael Anagnos was born on November 7, 1837 at Papingo, a mountain village of Epirus, Greece. He was of peasant origin, though his surname, Anagnostópoulos, shows that either his father, Demetrios, or his grandfather was Reader in the community at a time when the ability to read was a distinction.
Once Anagnos trudged sixteen hours to Janina where he won an academic scholarship. Then he spent four years at the University of Athens, his major studies being the classics and philosophy. From the Greek poets and orators he imbibed the love of liberty and the vehement patriotism and poetic style which afterward characterized his speeches and writings.
Early in career Anagnos read law but later chose journalism and became editor of a daily paper. Certain bitter polemics of his having brought him imprisonment, and his zeal for annexing Crete being disapproved of by his staff, he resigned his position.
He was thirty years old when, on Doctor Samuel G. Howe's going to Greece with relief for the Cretan refugees, Anagnos (as he thereafter called himself) gave his services as secretary and interpreter and later obtained this Philhellene's consent to accompany him to Boston and to Perkins Institution of which he was director and executive head. When Anagnos had learned English he became Doctor Howe's assistant and loyal understudy, and upon Doctor Howe's death in 1876 succeeded him.
The election of one whose abundant curly black beard and broken English marked him as a foreigner was not without misgivings. His prompt raising of a printing fund in memory of his predecessor, however, both put misgivings aside and showed Anagnos his own forte, the raising of money in behalf of blind children. Indeed, in this he far excelled Doctor Howe.
Anagnos started a kindergarten for blind children. Within twenty years he had raised $1, 000, 000 for it. Alike in that and in introducing Swedish gymnastics and sloyd he showed his progressiveness.
Nevertheless he was always set against any new proposal irreconcilable with the Perkins tradition. He chose assistants discriminatingly and, holding them responsible for results, was freed to read and study and to write voluminous though cogent annual reports.
It was said of him that his devotion to Greece constituted a real religion. The Greeks of this country chose him president of their union, formed through his eloquence to promote Pan-Hellenism and national liberty. But he had another means of helping Greece. His investments and his thrift had made him a comparatively rich man. He deposited in a bank at Athens $25, 000 to found in Papingo the Kallinean Free Schools, named for Kallina, his mother, and by his will left them one-sixth of the residue of his estate, and five-sixths to establish in Epirus a classical high school. It was while leisurely traveling in the Near East in the interests of his health and of these schools that he died. Civic exercises in his memory were held in Boston at which the governor of Massachusetts, the mayor of the city, and other prominent men spoke.
As Head of the Perkins Institute, Anagnos rapidly increased the school's stock of embossed books and appliances, he gathered a museum of stuffed objects and specimens for object teaching, as well as a special reference library on blindness and the blind, both hitherto found in European institutions only. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the cause of the blind was a kindergarten for little blind children, the first, largest, and best appointed in this country if not in the world. The former pupils of the kindergarten affectionately erected in its court a bronze bust of Anagnos. Every year, on Founder's Day (his birthday), his memory is revived by exercises at which his personality is described and his deeds rehearsed. Anagnos also was instrumental in starting the Boston Orthodox Cathedral parish.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Anagnos was a member of the Orthodox Church.
Anagnos opposed King Otto’s authoritarianism.
Anagnos served as president of the National Union of Greeks in the United States.
Anagnos had a great thirst for knowledge.
Quotes from others about the person
"His strength comforted our weakness, his firmness overcame our wavering ideas, his power smoothed away our obstacles, his noble unselfishness put to shame our petty differences of opinion, and his untiring devotion led us all to do our little as well as we could… Better than all, he taught us to the best of our ability to be men and women in our own homes. " - one of Anagnos's students.
"He was the man who taught the Greeks of America to learn and adopt everything that is good in the American character, the only man whom all Greeks revered and implicitly obeyed; the man who did good for the sake of the good; the man who conceived the idea of establishing a Greek school in Boston; the man who expected every Greek to do his duty toward his adopted country--America. " - T. T. Timayenis.
Anagnos was married to Julia Romana Howe, the daughter of Doctor Samuel G. Howe.
