The Sunday School Lesson That Changed Everything

In March 1841, a young Boston schoolteacher named Dorothea Dix agreed to teach a Sunday school class at the East Cambridge jail. What she found there altered the course of American history. Beyond the ordinary prisoners, she discovered mentally ill women locked in an unheated basement room, chained to walls, shivering in filth. The jailer shrugged. They couldn't feel the cold, he said.…