March 24

March 24 is the 84th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1765 to 2018 — a span of 253 years. The entry that anchors it: The Tydings–McDuffie Act is passed by the United States Congress, 1934.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1765, Great Britain passes the Quartering Act, which requires the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1854, President José Gregorio Monagas abolishes slavery in Venezuela.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1898, the Winton Motor Carriage Company, one of the first American car companies, sold its first unit.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1934, the Tydings–McDuffie Act is passed by the United States Congress, allowing the Philippines to become a self-governing commonwealth.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1982, Bangladeshi President Abdus Sattar is deposed in a bloodless coup led by Army Chief Lieutenant general Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who suspends the Constitution and imposes martial law.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1992, Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-45. Ten years on, in 2002, at the 74th Academy Awards, Halle Berry became the first African American to win Best Actress, winning for her role as Leticia Musgrove in Monster's Ball. Then, in 2018, students across the United States stage the March for Our Lives demanding gun control in response to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 24: Samuel Ashe (1725), American lawyer and politician, 9th governor of North Carolina; Thomas Cushing (1725), American lawyer and politician, 1st lieutenant governor of Massachusetts; Rufus King (1755), American lawyer and politician, United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom; Fanny Crosby (1820), American poet and composer; and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826), American activist and author.

March 24 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1882), American poet and educator; James Rudolph Garfield (1950), American lawyer and politician, 23rd United States Secretary of the Interior; Jean Goldkette (1962), French-American pianist and bandleader; and Alice Guy-Blaché (1968), American director, producer, and screenwriter.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims. Read end to end, March 24 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 253 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.