March 21

March 21 is the 81st day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1825 to 1980 — a span of 155 years. The entry that anchors it: Alexander H. Stephens, 1861.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1825, during his tour of the United States, the Marquis de Lafayette laid the cornerstone for the Nathanael Greene Monument in Savannah, Georgia. Then, in 1861, Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, gave an extemporaneous speech laying out the Confederacy's rationale for seceding from the United States.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1913, more than 360 were killed and 20,000 homes were destroyed in the Great Dayton Flood in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1946, the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington, making him the first African-American player in the National Football League since 1933. Then, in 1963, the Federal Bureau of Prisons closed Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California. Two years on, in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The same year, Ranger program — NASA launches Ranger 9, the last in a series of uncrewed lunar space probes. Then, in 1980, Cold War — American President Jimmy Carter announces a United States boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet–Afghan War.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 21: Francis Lewis (1713), Welsh-American merchant and politician; Mary Dixon Kies (1752), American inventor; Daria Pratt (1859), American golfer; George Owen Squier (1865), American general and inventor of Musak; and Antonia Maury (1866), American astronomer and astrophysicist.

March 21 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Edwin Vose Sumner (1863), American general; Ezra Abbot (1884), American scholar and academic; Joseph E. Johnston (1891), American general; and Frederick Winslow Taylor (1915), American golfer, tennis player, and engineer.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (International); International Day of Forests (International), by proclamation of the United Nations General Assembly; and Rosie the Riveter Day (United States). Taken together, the 8 entries on March 21 span 155 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.