November 1

November 1 is the 306th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1765 to 1982 — a span of 217 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1861.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1765, the British Parliament enacts the Stamp Act on the Thirteen Colonies in order to help pay for British military operations in North America.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1800, John Adams becomes the first President of the United States to live in the Executive Mansion (later renamed the White House) Then, in 1861, American Civil War — U.S. President Abraham Lincoln appoints George B. McClellan as the commander of the Union Army, replacing General Winfield Scott.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1897, the first Library of Congress building opens its doors to the public; the library had previously been housed in the Congressional Reading Room in the U.S. Capitol.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempt to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman at Blair House. Then, in 1963, Lê Quang Tung, loyalist head of the South Vietnam Special Forces, was executed in a U.S.-backed coup against president Ngô Đình Diệm following a period of religious unrest. Ten years on, in 1973, Watergate scandal — Leon Jaworski is appointed as the new Watergate Special Prosecutor. Nine years on, in 1982, Honda becomes the first Asian automobile company to produce cars in the United States with the opening of its factory in Marysville, Ohio; a Honda Accord is the first car produced there.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on November 1: John Taylor (1808), English-American religious leader, 3rd President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Caroline Still Anderson (1848), American physician, educator and abolitionist; William Merritt Chase (1849), American painter and educator; Charles Brantley Aycock (1859), American educator, lawyer, and politician, 50th Governor of North Carolina; and Stephen Crane (1871), American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

November 1 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: William Coddington (1678), American judge and politician, 1st Governor of Rhode Island; Charles Weeghman (1938), American businessman; Dixie Lee (1952), American singer; and Dale Carnegie (1955), American author and educator.

The date carries formal observance as well — Liberty Day (United States Virgin Islands) and National Brush Day (United States). Read end to end, November 1 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 217 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.