July 5

July 5 is the 187th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1811 to 1999 — a span of 188 years. The entry that anchors it: The National Labor Relations Act, 1935.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1811, the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence is adopted by a congress of the provinces. Then, in 1852, Abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivers his "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations in the United States, is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1950, Korean War — in the first encounter between North Korean and American forces, an unprepared and undisciplined U.S. Army task force was routed at the Battle of Osan. Then, in 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, is formally certified by President Richard Nixon. Then, in 1984, the United States Supreme Court gives its United States v. Leon decision providing a good-faith exception from the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule against use of evidence obtained through defective warrants in criminal trials.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1990, an explosion at a petrochemical plant in Channelview, Texas, United States, killed 17 people and injured 5 others. Nine years on, in 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton imposes trade and economic sanctions against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on July 5: Mary Walcott (1675), American accuser and witness at the Salem witch trials; Sylvester Graham (1794), American minister and activist; David Farragut (1801), American admiral; P. T. Barnum (1810), American businessman, co-founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; and William Collins Whitney (1841), American financier and politician, 31st United States Secretary of the Navy.

July 5 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Henry Johnson (1929), American sergeant; Daniel Sawyer (1937), American golfer; Carole Landis (1948), American actress; and Leo McCarey (1969), American director, producer, and screenwriter.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 188 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.