May 24

May 24 is the 145th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1844 to 2022 — a span of 178 years. The entry that anchors it: Samuel Morse sends the message "What hath God wrought" (a biblical quotation, 1844.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1844, Samuel Morse sends the message "What hath God wrought" (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from a committee room in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. Then, in 1861, American Civil War — Union troops occupy Alexandria, Virginia, with Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth becoming the first Union officer to be killed during the war.

Reconstruction and the years that followed added their own entries. In 1873, Patrick Francis Healy becomes the first black president of a predominantly white university in the United States.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1961, American civil rights movement — Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for "disturbing the peace" after disembarking from their bus. Two years on, in 1963, United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met with African American author James Baldwin in an unsuccessful attempt to improve race relations.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1994, four men are convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in New York in 1993; each one is sentenced to 240 years in prison. Eight years on, in 2002, Russia and the United States sign the Moscow Treaty. Then, in 2022, a mass shooting occurs at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, resulting in the deaths of 21 people, including 19 children.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 24: Emanuel Leutze (1816), German-American painter; George Grey Barnard (1863), American sculptor; Charlie Taylor (1868), American engineer and mechanic; Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870), American lawyer and judge; and Robert Garrett (1875), American discus thrower and shot putter.

May 24 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Elmer E. Ellsworth (1861), American colonel; William Lloyd Garrison (1879), American journalist and activist; Fanny Searls (1939), American biologist; and Thomas N. Heffron (1951), American actor, director, screenwriter.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 178 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.