March 27

March 27 is the 87th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1814 to 1999 — a span of 185 years. The entry that anchors it: President of the United States of America Andrew Johnson vetoes the Civil Rights Act of 1866. His veto is overridden by Congress and the bill passes into law on April 9, 1866.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1814, War of 1812 — in central Alabama, U.S. forces under General Andrew Jackson defeat the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1866, President of the United States of America Andrew Johnson vetoes the Civil Rights Act of 1866. His veto is overridden by Congress and the bill passes into law on April 9. Then, in 1884, a mob in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States attacks members of a jury which had returned a verdict of manslaughter in what was seen as a clear case of murder; over the next few days the mob would riot and burn down the courthouse.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1945, World War II — the United States Army Air Forces began Operation Starvation, laying naval mines in many of Japan's vital water routes and ports to disrupt enemy shipping.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1976, the Washington Metro, the second-busiest rapid transit system in the U.S., opened to commuters.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1990, the United States begins broadcasting anti-Castro propaganda to Cuba on TV Martí. Eight years on, in 1998, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug sildenafil, better known by the trade name Viagra, as the first treatment approved in the United States for erectile dysfunction. A year later, in 1999, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia — a U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth aircraft was shot down by a Yugoslav Army unit.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 27: Jane Colden (1724), American botanist and author; Alexander Barrow (1801), American lawyer and politician; Virginia Minor (1824), American women's suffrage activist; Adolphus Greely (1844), American general and explorer, Medal of Honor recipient; and William Libbey (1855), American target shooter, colonel, mountaineer, geographer, geologist, and archaeologist.

March 27 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: James Harper (1869), American publisher and politician, 65th Mayor of New York City; Joseph A. Campbell (1900), American businessman, founded the Campbell Soup Company; Alexander Emanuel Agassiz (1910), Swiss-American ichthyologist, zoologist, and engineer; and Richard Montgomery Gano (1913), American minister, physician, and general.

Taken together, the 8 entries on March 27 span 185 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.