October 14

October 14 is the 288th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1774 to 1982 — a span of 208 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1863.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1774, American Revolution — the First Continental Congress denounces the British Parliament's Intolerable Acts and demands British concessions.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1863, American Civil War — Confederate troops under the command of A. P. Hill fail to drive the Union Army completely out of Virginia. The same year, American Civil War — in the Battle of Bristoe Station, the Union II Corps surprised and repelled the Confederate attack on the Union rearguard, resulting in a Union victory.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1910, English aviator Claude Grahame-White lands his aircraft on Executive Avenue near the White House in Washington, D.C. Two years on, in 1912, Former president Theodore Roosevelt is shot and mildly wounded by John Flammang Schrank in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Roosevelt delivers his scheduled speech.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1949, the Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in the United States convicts eleven defendants of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal government. Then, in 1979, at least 75,000 people attended the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington, D.C., to demand equal civil rights for LGBT people. Three years on, in 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan proclaims a war on drugs.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on October 14: Preston King (1806), American lawyer and politician; Joe Start (1842), American baseball player and manager; Laura Askew Haygood (1845), American educator and missionary; John William Kendrick (1853), American engineer and businessman; and Julia A. Ames (1861), American journalist, editor, and reformer.

October 14 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Marshall Harlan (1911), American lawyer and politician; Errol Flynn (1959), Australian-American actor, singer, and producer; William Hogenson (1965), American sprinter; and Randall Jarrell (1965), American poet and author.

Read end to end, October 14 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 208 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.