April 29

April 29 is the 120th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1781 to 1974 — a span of 193 years. The entry that anchors it: Watergate scandal, 1974.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1781, American Revolutionary War — British and French ships clash in the Battle of Fort Royal off the coast of Martinique.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1861, Maryland in the American Civil War — Maryland's House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union. A year later, in 1862, American Civil War — the Siege of Corinth begins as Union forces under General Henry Halleck move to engage Confederate forces led by General P. G. T. Beauregard. The same year, American Civil War — the Capture of New Orleans by Union forces under David Farragut. A year later, in 1863, Confederate forts at Grand Gulf survived a bombardment by Union gunboats, preventing Ulysses S. Grant's troops from crossing the Mississippi River at that point.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1945, World War II — the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, and killed German prisoners of war.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1953, the first U.S. experimental 3D television broadcast shows an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV. Then, in 1974, Watergate scandal — United States President Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings relating to the scandal.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on April 29: Oliver Ellsworth (1745), American lawyer and politician, 3rd Chief Justice of the United States; Samuel Turell Armstrong (1784), American publisher and politician, 14th Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts; William Randolph Hearst (1863), American publisher and politician, founded the Hearst Corporation; Harry Payne Whitney (1872), American businessman and lawyer; and Forest Ray Moulton (1872), American astronomer and academic.

April 29 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Chester Ashley (1848), American politician; Paul Du Chaillu (1903), French-American anthropologist and zoologist; Ernest Fox Nichols (1924), American educator and physicist; and Ralph Delahaye Paine (1925), American journalist and author.

Read end to end, April 29 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 193 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.