May 14

May 14 is the 135th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1800 to 2010 — a span of 210 years. The entry that anchors it: The 6th United States Congress recesses, 1800.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1800, the 6th United States Congress recesses, and the process of moving the Federal government of the United States from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., begins the following day. Four years on, in 1804, William Clark and 42 men depart from Camp Dubois to join Meriwether Lewis at St Charles, Missouri, marking the beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition's historic journey up the Missouri River. The same year, Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Corps of Discovery left Camp Dubois near present-day Hartford, Illinois, to begin the first overland expedition to the West Coast of the United States and back. Then, in 1856, Major Henry C. Wayne arrived in Indianola, Texas, with 34 camels to form the short-lived United States Camel Corps. Seven years on, in 1863, American Civil War — Union troops captured Jackson, the capital of Mississippi.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1878, the last witchcraft trial in the United States opened in Salem, Massachusetts.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1973, Skylab, the United States' first space station, is launched.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2010, Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on the STS-132 mission to deliver the first shuttle-launched Russian ISS component — Rassvet. This was originally slated to be the final launch of Atlantis, before Congress approved STS-135.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 14: Timothy Dwight IV (1752), American minister, theologian, and academic; Samuel Dexter (1761), American lawyer and politician, 4th United States Secretary of War, 3rd United States Secretary of the Treasury; Anna Laurens Dawes (1851), American author and anti-suffragist; J. L. Wilkinson (1878), American baseball player and manager; and Fred Englehardt (1879), American jumper.

May 14 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Volney Howard (1889), American lawyer, jurist, and politician; Carl Schurz (1906), German-American general, journalist, and politician, 13th United States Secretary of the Interior; Henry J. Heinz (1919), American businessman, founded the H. J. Heinz Company; and David Belasco (1931), American director, producer, and playwright.

Taken together, the 8 entries on May 14 span 210 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.