December 3

December 3 is the 338th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1800 to 2009 — a span of 209 years. The entry that anchors it: United States presidential election, 1800.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1800, United States presidential election — the Electoral College casts votes for president and vice president that result in a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Then, in 1818, Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1901, in a State of the Union message, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a 20,000-word report to the House of Representatives asking Congress to curb the power of trusts "within reasonable limits". The speech was not delivered in person.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1979, Eleven people were crushed in a human stampede at a concert by British rock band the Who in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. Ten years on, in 1989, in a meeting off the coast of Malta, U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact may be coming to an end.

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 1999, NASA lost contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before it reached the atmosphere of Mars and disappeared. Six years on, in 2005, XCOR Aerospace makes the first crewed rocket aircraft delivery of U.S. Mail in Kern County, California. Four years on, in 2009, a suicide bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia, killed 25 people, including three ministers of the Transitional Federal Government.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 3: Gilbert Stuart (1755), American painter; Alfred Iverson Sr. (1798), American politician; Louisa Susannah Cheves McCord (1810), American author and political essayist; George B. McClellan (1826), American general and politician, 24th Governor of New Jersey; and Cleveland Abbe (1838), American meteorologist and academic.

December 3 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Carroll (1815), American archbishop; Samuel Cooper (1876), American general; David Bratton (1904), American water polo player; and Mary Baker Eddy (1910), American religious leader and author, founded Christian Science.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day of Persons with Disabilities. December 3 carries 8 entries spread across 209 years. None of the people in them knew they were sharing a date; that is a pattern only visible looking back.