May 6

May 6 is the 127th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1861 to 2013 — a span of 152 years. The entry that anchors it: U.S. president Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, 1882.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1861, American Civil War — Arkansas secedes from the Union. Two years on, in 1863, American Civil War — the Battle of Chancellorsville ends with a major defeat of the Union's Army of the Potomac under Joseph Hooker by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee.

Reconstruction and the years that followed added their own entries. In 1877, Chief Crazy Horse of the Oglala Lakota surrenders to United States troops in Nebraska. Five years on, in 1882, U.S. president Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, implementing a ban on Chinese immigration to the United States that remained for 61 years.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1935, New Deal — under the authority of the newly-enacted Federal Emergency Relief Administration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 7034 to create the Works Progress Administration. Seven years on, in 1942, World War II — Japanese troops overcame fierce American and Philippine resistance to win the Battle of Corregidor.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1996, the body of former CIA director William Colby is found washed up on a riverbank in southern Maryland, eight days after he disappeared. Then, in 2013, three women, kidnapped and missing for more than a decade, are found alive in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 6: Joseph Brackett (1797), American religious leader and composer; Hermann Raster (1827), German-American journalist and politician; Grove Karl Gilbert (1843), American geologist and academic; Robert Peary (1856), American admiral and explorer; and Max Ophüls (1902), German-American director and screenwriter.

May 6 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Henry David Thoreau (1862), American essayist, poet, and philosopher; Socrates Nelson (1867), American businessman and politician; Abraham Joseph Ash (1888), American rabbi (born c. 1813); and L. Frank Baum (1919), American novelist.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 152 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.