June 29

June 29 is the 181st day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 2006 — a span of 230 years. The entry that anchors it: More than 50, 1913.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1776, the first privateer battle of the American Revolutionary War, the Battle of Turtle Gut Inlet, was fought near Cape May, New Jersey.

Reconstruction and the years that followed added their own entries. In 1889, Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships voted to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest city by area in the United States and the second-largest by population.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1913, more than 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans gathered at the Gettysburg Battlefield, the largest combined reunion of American Civil War veterans ever held. Then, in 1927, the Bird of Paradise, a U.S. Army Air Corps Fokker tri-motor, completes the first transpacific flight, from the mainland United States to Hawaii.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1950, Korean War — U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorizes a sea blockade of Korea. Six years on, in 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System. Then, in 1972, the United States Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 2006, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 29: Lavinia Stoddard (1787), American poet, school founder; John Newton Brown (1803), American minister and author; Thomas Dunn English (1819), American poet, playwright, and politician; Celia Thaxter (1835), American poet and story writer; and John Hunn (1849), American businessman and politician, 51st Governor of Delaware.

June 29 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Edward Taylor (1729), American-English poet, pastor, and physician (born circa 1642); Henry Clay (1852), American lawyer and politician, 9th United States Secretary of State; John Gorrie (1855), American physician and humanitarian; and Roscoe Arbuckle (1933), American actor, director, and screenwriter.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 230 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.