February 23

February 23 is the 54th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1778 to 2008 — a span of 230 years. The entry that anchors it: President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrives secretly in Washington, 1861.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1778, American Revolutionary War — Prussian military officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania as a volunteer for the Continental Army.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1836, Texas Revolution — the Siege of the Alamo (prelude to the Battle of the Alamo) begins in San Antonio, Texas. Then, in 1847, Mexican–American War — the United States Army used artillery to repulse the much larger Mexican army at the Battle of Buena Vista near Saltillo. Then, in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrives secretly in Washington, D.C., after the thwarting of an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1870, Reconstruction Era — Post-U.S. Civil War military control of Mississippi ends and it is readmitted to the Union.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1927, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs a bill by Congress establishing the Federal Radio Commission (later replaced by the Federal Communications Commission) which was to regulate the use of radio frequencies in the United States.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2008, a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber crashed on the runway shortly after takeoff from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam in the most expensive crash in U.S. Air Force history. The same year, a United States Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber crashes on Guam, marking the first operational loss of a B-2.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on February 23: W. E. B. Du Bois (1868), American sociologist, historian, and activist; Guy C. Wiggins (1883), American painter; Cyril Delevanti (1889), English-American actor; Victor Fleming (1889), American director, cinematographer, and producer; and John Gilbert Winant (1889), American captain, pilot, and politician, 60th Governor of New Hampshire.

February 23 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Quincy Adams (1848), American politician, 6th President of the United States; Leo Baekeland (1944), Belgian-American chemist and engineer; John Robert Gregg (1948), Irish-American publisher and educator; and Dickinson W. Richards (1973), American physician and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate.

The date carries formal observance as well — National Day (Brunei). Read end to end, February 23 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 230 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.