June 4

June 4 is the 156th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1812 to 2004 — a span of 192 years. The entry that anchors it: Women's rights, 1919.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1812, following Louisiana's admittance as a U.S. state, the Louisiana Territory is renamed the Missouri Territory. Then, in 1825, General Lafayette, a French officer in the American Revolutionary War, speaks at what would become Lafayette Square in Buffalo, New York, during his visit to the United States. Then, in 1862, American Civil War — Confederate troops evacuate Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River, leaving the way clear for Union troops to take Memphis, Tennessee.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1876, an express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco via the first transcontinental railroad, 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1919, Women's rights — the U.S. Congress approves the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification. Then, in 1939, The Holocaust — the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 973 German Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps. Five years on, in 1944, World War II — a hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the German Kriegsmarine submarine U-505, the first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2004, in Granby, Colorado, U.S., Marvin Heemeyer went on a rampage with a modified bulldozer over a zoning dispute, destroying several buildings before dying by suicide.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 4: Nictzin Dyalhis (1873), American author; Clara Blandick (1880), American actress; Beno Gutenberg (1889), German-American seismologist; Rosalind Russell (1907), American actress; and Robert F. Furchgott (1916), American biochemist and pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate.

June 4 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Frederick Muhlenberg (1801), American minister and politician, 1st Speaker of the United States House of Representatives; Margaret Murray Washington (1925), American Academic; Harry Frazee (1929), American director, producer, and agent; and Tommy Ladnier (1939), American trumpet player.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression (International). Read end to end, June 4 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 192 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.