November 10

November 10 is the 315th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1775 to 2008 — a span of 233 years. The entry that anchors it: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicates the USMC War Memorial (Iwo Jima memorial) in Arlington Ridge Park in Arlington County, 1954.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1775, the United States Marine Corps is founded at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia by Samuel Nicholas.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1865, Henry Wirz, the Confederate superintendent of Andersonville Prison, was hanged after a controversial conviction, becoming the only American Civil War officer executed for war crimes.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1898, White supremacists seized power and massacred black Americans during the Wilmington massacre, the only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in United States history.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1951, with the rollout of the North American Numbering Plan, direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States. Three years on, in 1954, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicates the USMC War Memorial (Iwo Jima memorial) in Arlington Ridge Park in Arlington County, Virginia. Then, in 1969, the children's television series Sesame Street premiered in the United States.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2006, the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia is opened and dedicated by U.S. President George W. Bush, who announces that Marine Corporal Jason Dunham will posthumously receive the Medal of Honor. Two years on, in 2008, over five months after landing on Mars, NASA declares the Phoenix mission concluded after communications with the lander were lost.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on November 10: Samuel Gridley Howe (1801), American physician and activist; Henry Eyster Jacobs (1844), American educator and theologian; Winston Churchill (1871), American author and painter; Idabelle Smith Firestone (1874), American composer and songwriter; and Cy Morgan (1878), American baseball player.

November 10 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Alphonse de Tonty (1727), French-American sailor and explorer; Cornstalk (1777), American tribal chief; Henry Wirz (1865), Swiss-American captain in Confederate army, commandant of Andersonville Prison; and John E. Wool (1869), American general.

The date carries formal observance as well — United States Marine Corps birthday (United States). Taken together, the 8 entries on November 10 span 233 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.