December 22

December 22 is the 357th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1807 to 2018 — a span of 211 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1864.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1807, the Embargo Act, forbidding trade with all foreign countries, is passed by the U.S. Congress at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson. Then, in 1825, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., burns. Then, in 1864, American Civil War — Savannah, Georgia, falls to the Union's Army of the Tennessee, and General Sherman tells President Abraham Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah"

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order giving World War II refugees precedence in visa applications under U.S. immigration quotas.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1964, the first test flight of the SR-71 (Blackbird) takes place at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, United States. Then, in 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford creates the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to the 1970s energy crisis.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2010, the repeal of the Don't ask, don't tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, is signed into law by President Barack Obama. Eight years on, in 2018, the 2018–2019 United States federal government shutdown, the second-longest shutdown of the U.S. federal government in history, begins.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 22: Teresa Carreño (1853), Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter and pianist; Frank B. Kellogg (1856), American lawyer and politician, 45th United States Secretary of State, Nobel Prize laureate; Connie Mack (1862), American baseball player and manager; Charles Sands (1865), American golfer and tennis player; and Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869), American poet and playwright.

December 22 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: William Vernon (1806), English-American merchant; John Chisum (1884), American cattle baron; Dwight L. Moody (1899), American evangelist and publisher, founded Moody Publishers; and Rose Talbot Bullard (1915), American medical doctor and professor.

Taken together, the 8 entries on December 22 span 211 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.