December 21

December 21 is the 356th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1620 to 2004 — a span of 384 years. The entry that anchors it: Medal of Honor, 1861.

The colonial record reaches this date first. In 1620, the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower landed at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, to establish the Plymouth Colony.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1826, settlers from the United States in Mexican Texas made the first attempt to secede from Mexico, establishing the short-lived Republic of Fredonia. The same year, American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declare their independence, starting the Fredonian Rebellion. Then, in 1861, Medal of Honor — Public Resolution 82, containing a provision for a Navy Medal of Valor, is signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1919, after serving two years in prison for encouraging people to resist military conscription, anarchist Emma Goldman was deported from the United States to Russia. Then, in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cel-animated feature in film history, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1968, Apollo 8 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a trajectory to the Moon; its crew became the first humans to visit another celestial body.

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 2004, Iraq War — a suicide bomber kills 22 at the forward operating base next to the main U.S. military airfield at Mosul, Iraq, the single deadliest suicide attack on American soldiers in Iraq.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 21: William H. Osborn (1820), American businessman; John H. Ketcham (1832), American general and politician; Thomas Chipman McRae (1851), American lawyer and politician, 26th Governor of Arkansas; George W. Fuller (1868), American chemist and engineer; and Trevor Kincaid (1872), Canadian-American zoologist and academic.

December 21 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: I. L. Patterson (1929), American politician, 18th Governor of Oregon; Violette Neatley Anderson (1937), American judge; Ted Healy (1937), American comedian and actor; and Frank B. Kellogg (1937), American lawyer and politician, 45th United States Secretary of State, Nobel Prize laureate.

December 21 carries 8 entries spread across 384 years. None of the people in them knew they were sharing a date; that is a pattern only visible looking back.