December 24

December 24 is the 359th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1814 to 1973 — a span of 159 years. The entry that anchors it: The U.S. Congress granted home rule to Washington, 1973.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1814, the United Kingdom and the United States signed a peace treaty in Ghent, present-day Belgium, ending the War of 1812. Then, in 1865, six Confederate veterans of the American Civil War founded a social club they named the Ku Klux Klan, which later became a white supremacist group.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1913, Seventy-three people were crushed to death in a stampede after someone falsely yelled "fire" at a crowded Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan, U.S. Then, in 1929, a four alarm fire breaks out in the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C. Then, in 1943, World War II — U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower is named Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1964, the Viet Cong bombed the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, killing two U.S. Army officers and raising fears of an escalation of the Vietnam War. Four years on, in 1968, Piloted by Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 became the first human spaceflight to reach and orbit the Moon. Five years on, in 1973, the U.S. Congress granted home rule to Washington, D.C., allowing the residents to elect their own mayor and a city council.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 24: Kit Carson (1809), American general; Charles Harvey Bollman (1868), American naturalist; Frederick Semple (1872), American golfer and tennis player; Johnny Gruelle (1880), American author and illustrator; and Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881), American composer and critic.

December 24 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Johns Hopkins (1873), American businessman and philanthropist; James C. Corrigan (1908), Canadian-American businessman; John Muir (1914), Scottish-American geologist, botanist, and author, founded Sierra Club; and Stephen Mosher Wood (1920), American lieutenant and politician.

The date carries formal observance as well — Christmas Eve (Christianity) and its related observances: — Feast of the Seven Fishes (Italian Americans). 8 entries, 159 years, one square on the calendar. December 24 is a reminder that history is experienced as an ordinary day before it is remembered as a date.