July 7

July 7 is the 189th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1777 to 2019 — a span of 242 years. The entry that anchors it: US President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act into law, 1958.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1777, American Revolutionary War — British forces caught up with American troops withdrawing from Ticonderoga, capturing more than 200 men at the Battle of Hubbardton. Then, in 1798, Outraged by the XYZ Affair, the United States rescinded its treaties with France, resulting in the undeclared Quasi-War, fought entirely at sea.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1865, four conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are hanged.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1898, US president William McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, annexing Hawaii as a territory of the United States.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1958, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act into law. Then, in 1981, US President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2016, a U.S. Army Reserve veteran ambushed and shot at police officers in Dallas, killing five of them and injuring nine others, before being killed by a bomb attached to a police robot. Three years on, in 2019, the United States defeated the Netherlands 2–0 at the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup final in Lyon, France.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on July 7: Jane Elizabeth Conklin (1831), American poet and religious writer; Charles Albert Tindley (1851), American minister and composer; Nettie Stevens (1861), American geneticist; Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869), American academic; and Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880), American engineer, invented sliced bread.

July 7 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: William Stoughton (1701), American judge and politician, Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay; Edward Burd Grubb Jr. (1913), American general and diplomat, United States Ambassador to Spain; Clarence Hudson White (1925), American photographer and educator; and Henry Eyster Jacobs (1932), American theologian and educator.

Taken together, the 8 entries on July 7 span 242 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.