August 6

August 6 is the 219th 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: U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, 1965.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1777, the Battle of Oriskany, one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolutionary War, was fought about 6 mi (10 km) east of Fort Stanwix, New York. Ten years on, in 1787, Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1825, the Bolivian Declaration of Independence is proclaimed. Then, in 1862, American Civil War — the Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1942, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands becomes the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress. Three years on, in 1945, World War II — the U.S. Army Air Force bomber Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing about 70,000 people instantly.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1965, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, outlawing literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disfranchisement of African Americans.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2011, War in Afghanistan — a United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, seven Afghan soldiers, and one Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on August 6: Richard Bennett (1609), English-American politician, Colonial Governor of Virginia; Anna Haining Bates (1846), Canadian-American giant; Susie Taylor (1848), American writer and first black Army nurse; Charles Fort (1874), American author; and Wallace H. White Jr. (1877), American lawyer and politician.

August 6 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: James A. Bayard (1815), American lawyer and politician; James Springer White (1881), American religious leader, co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church; Jennie de la Montagnie Lozier (1915), American physician; and Bix Beiderbecke (1931), American cornet player, pianist, and composer.

Taken together, the 8 entries on August 6 span 234 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.