The story
December 27: Having coined the phrase "manifest destiny" the previous July
December 27 is the 362nd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1831 to 2024 — a span of 193 years. The entry that anchors it: Having coined the phrase "manifest destiny" the previous July, 1845.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1831, HMS Beagle departed Plymouth, England, on a voyage to South America that established Charles Darwin as a naturalist. Then, in 1845, Having coined the phrase "manifest destiny" the previous July, journalist John L. O'Sullivan argued in his newspaper New York Morning News that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon Country.
In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1927, Kern and Hammerstein's musical play Show Boat, considered to be the first true American musical play, opens at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Broadway.
The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1968, Apollo program — Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital crewed mission to the Moon. Then, in 1979, Soviet–Afghan War — Soviet troops stormed Tajbeg Palace outside Kabul and killed Afghan president Hafizullah Amin and his 100–150 elite guards. Six years on, in 1985, the body of murdered American primatologist Dian Fossey was discovered inside her cabin in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 1999, Burger King and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission order a recall of plastic Poké Ball containers after they are determined to be a choking hazard. Then, in 2024, Acting president and prime minister of South Korea Han Duck-soo was impeached by the National Assembly.
The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 27: Charles Hodge (1797), American theologian; Louis Lincoln Emmerson (1863), American lawyer and politician, 27th Governor of Illinois; Sydney Greenstreet (1879), English-American actor; Cyrus S. Eaton (1883), Canadian-American businessman and philanthropist; and Louis Bromfield (1896), American author and theorist.
December 27 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Stephen F. Austin (1836), American soldier and politician; Charles Martin Hall (1914), American chemist and engineer; Calvin Bridges (1938), American geneticist and academic; and Zona Gale (1938), American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.
December 27 carries 8 entries spread across 193 years. None of the people in them knew they were sharing a date; that is a pattern only visible looking back.
412 words · composed from 8 cited entries