April 14

April 14 is the 105th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1775 to 2003 — a span of 228 years. The entry that anchors it: Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth fatally shot U.S. president Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, 1865.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first abolition society in North America, is organized in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1865, Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth fatally shot U.S. president Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1890, the Pan-American Union is founded by the First International Conference of American States in Washington, D.C. Four years on, in 1894, the first ever commercial motion picture house opens in New York City, United States. It uses ten Kinetoscopes, devices for peep-show viewing of films.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1908, the first Hauser Dam in the U.S. state of Montana failed, causing severe flooding and damage downstream.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1991, the Republic of Georgia introduces the post of President following its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. Three years on, in 1994, Iraqi no-fly zones conflict — in a friendly-fire incident during Operation Provide Comfort, two U.S. Air Force aircraft mistakenly shot down two U.S. Army helicopters over northern Iraq, killing 26 people. Nine years on, in 2003, U.S. troops in Baghdad capture Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian group that killed an American on the hijacked cruise liner MS Achille Lauro in 1985.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on April 14: David G. Burnet (1788), American politician, 2nd Vice-president of Texas; Harriett Ellen Grannis Arey (1819), American educator, author, editor, and publisher; Anne Sullivan (1866), American educator; Edward C. Tolman (1886), American psychologist; and Claire Windsor (1892), American actress.

April 14 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Charles Lot Church (1864), American-Canadian politician; Addie Joss (1911), American baseball player and journalist; John Singer Sargent (1925), American painter; and Emmy Noether (1935), German-American mathematician and academic.

The date carries formal observance as well — Pan American Day (several countries in the Americas). Taken together, the 8 entries on April 14 span 228 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.