July 28

July 28 is the 210th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1854 to 1995 — a span of 141 years. The entry that anchors it: During the Great Depression, 1932.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1854, USS Constellation (1854), the last all-sail warship built by the United States Navy and current museum ship in Baltimore Harbor, is commissioned. Ten years on, in 1864, American Civil War — in the Battle of Ezra Church, Confederate troops make a third unsuccessful attempt under General John Bell Hood to prevent Union forces led by General William T. Sherman from approaching Atlanta, Georgia.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1866, Aged 18, Vinnie Ream became the youngest artist and first woman to receive a United States government commission for a statue—that of Abraham Lincoln currently in the Capitol rotunda. Two years on, in 1868, the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is certified, establishing African American citizenship and guaranteeing due process of law.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1915, U.S. Marines landed at Port-au-Prince to begin a nineteen-year occupation of Haiti. Then, in 1932, during the Great Depression, U.S. president Herbert Hoover orders the United States Army to forcibly evict the "Bonus Army" of World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1965, Vietnam War — U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson announces his order to increase the number of United States troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1995, two followers of the Indian mystic Rajneesh were convicted of a 1985 plot to assassinate Charles Turner, the U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on July 28: Thomas Heyward Jr. (1746), American judge and politician; James Edson White (1849), American author and publisher, second son of Ellen G. White and James S. White; Ballington Booth (1857), English-American activist, co-founded Volunteers of America; Elias M. Ammons (1860), American businessman and politician, 19th Governor of Colorado; and Albertson Van Zo Post (1866), American fencer.

July 28 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: George Law Curry (1878), American publisher and politician; Edward Beecher (1895), American minister and theologian; John DeWitt (1930), American hammer thrower; and Marie Dressler (1934), Canadian-American actress and singer.

Read end to end, July 28 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 141 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.