March 25

March 25 is the 85th 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: American Civil War, 1865.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1776, American Revolutionary War — American Patriot forces in Georgia conducted a raid on Tybee Island, with the primary goal of capturing runaway slaves seeking refuge with the British.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1865, American Civil War — in Virginia during the Siege of Petersburg, Confederate forces temporarily capture Fort Stedman from the Union before being repulsed.

Reconstruction and the years that followed added their own entries. In 1894, Coxey's Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1948, Meteorologists at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, United States, issued the world's first tornado forecast after noticing conditions similar to another tornado that had struck five days earlier. Nine years on, in 1957, United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Eight years on, in 1965, Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully complete their four-day 50-mile (80 km) march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. Then, in 1979, the first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 2006, a gunman in Seattle, Washington, U.S., entered a rave afterparty and opened fire, killing six and wounding two, before committing suicide.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 25: John Barry (1745), Irish-American naval officer and father of the American navy; Clinton L. Merriam (1824), American banker and politician; George Montgomery White (1828), American politician; Myles Keogh (1840), Irish-American colonel; and Simon Flexner (1863), American physician and academic.

March 25 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: William Colgate (1857), English-American businessman and philanthropist, founded Colgate-Palmolive; Edward Bates (1869), American politician and lawyer; Durham Stevens (1908), American diplomat; and Elizabeth Storrs Mead (1917), American academic.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (international); International Day of Solidarity with Detained and Missing Staff Members (United Nations General Assembly); International Day of the Unborn Child (international); and Maryland Day (Maryland, United States). 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.