March 3

March 3 is the 63rd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 1969 — a span of 193 years. The entry that anchors it: The U.S. Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, 1820.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1776, American Revolutionary War — the first amphibious landing of the United States Marine Corps begins the Battle of Nassau. The same year, American Revolutionary War — Samuel Nicholas and the Continental Marines successfully landed on New Providence in the Bahamas and began a raid of Nassau, capturing the port the next day. Three years on, in 1779, American Revolutionary War — the Continental Army is routed at the Battle of Brier Creek near Savannah, Georgia.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1820, the U.S. Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which balanced the admission of Missouri as a slave state with that of Maine as a free state.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1873, Censorship in the United States — the U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any "obscene literature and articles of immoral use" through the mail.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1913, thousands of women marched in Washington, D.C., "in a spirit of protest" against the exclusion of women from American society. The same year, thousands of women march in the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1969, Apollo program — NASA launches Apollo 9 to test the lunar module.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 3: George Pullman (1831), American engineer and businessman, founded the Pullman Company; Alexander Graham Bell (1847), Scottish-American engineer and academic, invented the telephone; John Montgomery Ward (1860), American baseball player and manager; Fred A. Busse (1866), American lawyer and politician, 39th Mayor of Chicago; and William Green (1873), American union leader and politician.

March 3 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Oliver Cowdery (1850), American religious leader; Ned Williamson (1894), American baseball player; George Gilman (1901), American businessman, founded The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company; and Katharine Wright (1929), American educator.

Taken together, the 8 entries on March 3 span 193 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.