December 28

December 28 is the 363rd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1832 to 1973 — a span of 141 years. The entry that anchors it: The United States Endangered Species Act is signed into law by President Richard Nixon, 1973.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1832, John C. Calhoun becomes the first Vice President of the United States to resign. He resigned after being elected Senator from South Carolina. Three years on, in 1835, Osceola leads his Seminole warriors in Florida into the Second Seminole War against the United States Army. Then, in 1846, Iowa is admitted as the 29th U.S. state. Then, in 1862, American Civil War — Union forces defeated a Confederate cavalry unit in the Van Buren raid, capturing three steamboats, Confederate troops, and various supplies.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1916, Up to 1,000 lumber workers initiated a labor strike against the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company in Minnesota, United States, which lasted over a month.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1958, "Greatest Game Ever Played" — the Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in the first ever National Football League sudden death overtime game at New York's Yankee Stadium to win the NFL Championship. Then, in 1972, the last scheduled day for induction into the military by the Selective Service System. Due to the fact that President Richard Nixon declared this day a national day of mourning due to former President Harry S Truman's death, approximately 300 men were not able to report due to most Federal offices being closed. Since the draft was not resumed in 1973, they were never drafted. A year later, in 1973, the United States Endangered Species Act is signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 28: Eliza Lucas (1722), Caribbean-American agriculturalist; Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789), American novelist of "domestic fiction"; Calixa Lavallée (1842), Canadian-American lieutenant and composer; Woodrow Wilson (1856), American historian and politician, 28th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate; and F. W. Murnau (1888), German-American director, producer, and screenwriter.

December 28 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: James Van Ness (1872), American lawyer and politician, 7th Mayor of San Francisco; Dennis Miller Bunker (1890), American painter; William Corby (1897), American priest and academic; and Clarence Day (1935), American author and illustrator.

Taken together, the 8 entries on December 28 span 141 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.