March 20

March 20 is the 80th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1852 to 2003 — a span of 151 years. The entry that anchors it: The Republican Party was founded in Ripon, 1854.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States, was published. Two years on, in 1854, the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, by politicians opposing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery in the United States.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1922, the United States Navy commissioned its first aircraft carrier, USS Langley. A year later, in 1923, the Arts Club of Chicago hosted the opening of Pablo Picasso's first solo United States showing, entitled Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso. Then, in 1944, World War II — U.S. Marines made a landing on Emirau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago to develop an airbase as part of Operation Cartwheel.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1952, the US Senate ratifies the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan. Then, in 1987, the antiretroviral drug zidovudine became the first treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for HIV/AIDS.

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 2003, Iraq War — the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland begin an invasion of Iraq.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 20: George Caleb Bingham (1811), American painter and politician, State Treasurer of Missouri; Ned Buntline (1821), American journalist, author, and publisher; Solomon L. Spink (1831), American lawyer and politician; Charles William Eliot (1834), American mathematician and academic; and Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856), American tennis player and engineer.

March 20 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Lewis A. Grant (1918), American general and lawyer; Arthur F. Andrews (1930), American cyclist; Giuseppe Zangara (1933), Italian-American assassin of Anton Cermak (born 1900; executed); and Dorothy Campbell (1945), Scottish-American golfer.

The date carries formal observance as well — Great American MeatOut (United States); International Day of Happiness (United Nations); and National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (United States). March 20 carries 8 entries spread across 151 years. None of the people in them knew they were sharing a date; that is a pattern only visible looking back.