June 1

June 1 is the 153rd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1779 to 1999 — a span of 220 years. The entry that anchors it: The first land battle of the American Civil War after Fort Sumter took place in the village of Fairfax, 1861.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1779, the court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, begins. Then, in 1796, Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1812, War of 1812 — U.S. President James Madison asks the Congress to declare war on the United Kingdom. A year later, in 1813, War of 1812 — Mortally wounded, U.S. Navy captain James Lawrence ordered his crew "Don't give up the ship!" as USS Chesapeake was captured by HMS Shannon off the coast of Boston. Then, in 1861, the first land battle of the American Civil War after Fort Sumter took place in the village of Fairfax, Virginia.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1916, the United States Senate confirms the appointment of Louis Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court, making him the first Jew to be an Associate Justice.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1950, the Declaration of Conscience speech, by U.S. Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, is delivered in response to Joseph R. McCarthy's speech at Wheeling, West Virginia.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1999, on landing at Little Rock National Airport in the U.S. state of Arkansas, American Airlines Flight 1420 overran the runway and crashed, resulting in 11 deaths.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 1: Brigham Young (1801), American religious leader, 2nd President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; John Hunt Morgan (1825), American general; John Bell Hood (1831), American general; John Marshall Harlan (1833), American lawyer, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and politician; Attorney General of Kentucky; and Sam Dreben (1878), American soldier and mercenary.

June 1 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Mary Dyer (1660), English-American martyr; Edward Holyoke (1769), American pastor and academic; Oliver Wolcott Jr. (1833), American lawyer and politician, 2nd United States Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Governor of Connecticut; and John Quincy Marr (1861), American captain.

Taken together, the 8 entries on June 1 span 220 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.