June 13

June 13 is the 165th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1774 to 2002 — a span of 228 years. The entry that anchors it: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1967.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1774, Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain's North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1777, American Revolutionary War — Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1805, Lewis and Clark Expedition — Meriwether Lewis became the first white American to sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River. Then, in 1850, the American League of Colored Laborers, the first African American labor union in the United States, is established in New York City.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1966, the United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights before questioning them (colloquially known as "Mirandizing") A year later, in 1967, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Four years on, in 1971, the New York Times published the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2002, the United States withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 13: Winfield Scott (1786), American general; Dwight B. Waldo (1864), American historian and academic; Wallace Clement Sabine (1868), American physicist and academic; Thomas N. Heffron (1872), American actor, director, and screenwriter; and Bruno Frank (1887), German-American author, poet, and playwright.

June 13 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Henry Middleton (1784), American farmer and politician, 2nd President of the Continental Congress; Henry Segrave (1930), American-English racing driver; Irving Baxter (1957), American high jumper and pole vaulter; and Benny Goodman (1986), American clarinet player, songwriter and bandleader.

Taken together, the 8 entries on June 13 span 228 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.