April 27

April 27 is the 118th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1777 to 2011 — a span of 234 years. The entry that anchors it: John Ehrlichman, 1978.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1777, American Revolutionary War — British Army regulars defeated Patriot militias in the Battle of Ridgefield, galvanizing resistance in the Connecticut Colony.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1805, First Barbary War — U.S. Marines engaged forces of the Barbary Coast at the Battle of Derna in Tripoli, marking the first recorded land battle by the United States on foreign soil. Then, in 1861, American President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1976, Thirty-seven people are killed when American Airlines Flight 625 crashes at Cyril E. King Airport in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Two years on, in 1978, John Ehrlichman, a former aide to U.S. President Richard Nixon, is released from the Federal Correctional Institution, Safford, Arizona, after serving 18 months for Watergate-related crimes. Nine years on, in 1987, the U.S. Department of Justice bars Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (and his wife, Elisabeth, who had also been a Nazi) from entering the US, charging that he had aided in the deportations and executions of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 2006, construction begins on the Freedom Tower (later renamed One World Trade Center) in New York City. Five years on, in 2011, the 2011 Super Outbreak devastates parts of the Southeastern United States, especially the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. Two hundred five tornadoes touched down on April 27 alone, killing more than 300 and injuring hundreds more.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on April 27: Samuel Morse (1791), American painter and inventor, co-invented the Morse code; William W. Snow (1812), American lawyer and politician; Ulysses S. Grant (1822), American general and politician, 18th President of the United States; William Arms Fisher (1861), American composer and music historian; and Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882), American author and poet.

April 27 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Zebulon Pike (1813), American general and explorer; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882), American poet and philosopher; Hart Crane (1932), American poet; and Benjamin Faunce (1949), American druggist and businessman.

The record for April 27 runs 234 years deep across 8 entries. Read in sequence, the date stops being a coincidence and starts being a through-line.