On this day in ...… 1683, William Penn signed the “Great Treaty” with the chiefs of the Lenni Lenape tribe to guarantee the peace among them. The area of land they where sharing was given to Penn by England's King Charles II. Penn later named this land Pennsylvania. On that day, William Penn reportedly said:
'We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good-will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts; we are of one flesh and one blood.'Tamanend, one of the chiefs, is said to have replied:
“We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”The Great Treaty was not broken until the Penn’s Creek Massacre of October 16, 1755. (credit for Penn's Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West, 1771)
… 1889 (120 years ago today), Anna Akhmatova (right), a poet credited with a large influence on Russian poetry, was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, Ukraine. Her most accomplished works, Requiem, which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987, and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror, a period during which she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss. She was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966. (credit for 1922 portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin)
(Prior June 23 posts are here and here.)
