April 26

April 26 is the 117th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1777 to 1991 — a span of 214 years. The entry that anchors it: Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, 1958.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1777, American Revolutionary War — Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington allegedly rode forty miles (64 km) through the night to warn militiamen under her father Henry's command that British troops were planning to invade Danbury, Connecticut.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1805, First Barbary War — United States Marines capture Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon. Then, in 1865, U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, ending a twelve-day manhunt.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1944, World War II — U.S. Navy submarines began attacks on Japan's Take Ichi convoy as it sailed in waters between Taiwan and the Philippines, eventually sinking four vessels and killing more than 4,000 troops. A year later, in 1945, World War II — Filipino troops of the 66th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Commonwealth Army, USAFIP-NL and the American troops of the 33rd and 37th Infantry Division, United States Army liberate Baguio as they fight against the Japanese forces under General Tomoyuki Yamashita.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1958, Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives. Four years on, in 1962, NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1991, Fifty-five tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on April 26: Esek Hopkins (1718), American commander; John James Audubon (1785), French-American ornithologist and painter; Ambrose Dudley Mann (1801), American politician and diplomat, 1st United States Assistant Secretary of State; Charles Goodyear (1804), American banker, lawyer, and politician; and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822), American journalist and designer, co-designed Central Park.

April 26 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Wilkes Booth (1865), American actor, assassin of Abraham Lincoln; John Bunny (1915), American actor; Ida Hunt Udall (1915), American diarist; and James Larkin White (1946), American miner, explorer, and park ranger.

The date carries formal observance as well — Confederate Memorial Day (Florida, United States). Taken together, the 8 entries on April 26 span 214 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.