August 2

August 2 is the 215th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 1991 — a span of 215 years. The entry that anchors it: American Revolution, 1776.

In the years around independence, the date turns political. In 1776, American Revolution — the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress takes place. Then, in 1790, the first United States census was officially completed, with the nation's residential population enumerated to be 3,929,214.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1923, U.S. Vice President Calvin Coolidge becomes president upon the death of President Warren G. Harding. Nine years on, in 1932, at the California Institute of Technology, American physicist Carl David Anderson proved the existence of antimatter with the discovery of the positron, for which he would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics. Seven years on, in 1939, Leo Szilard penned a letter, signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany may develop atomic bombs, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. Four years on, in 1943, World War II — after the Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109 is rammed and sunk by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, Lt. John F. Kennedy, future U.S. president, saves all but two of his crew.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1947, Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes; its wreckage was not found until 1998.

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 1991, Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on STS-43 to deploy the TDRS-5 satellite.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on August 2: Pierre Charles L'Enfant (1754), French-American architect and engineer, designed Washington, D.C.; Elisha Gray (1835), American businessman, co-founded Western Electric; Irving Babbitt (1865), American academic and critic; John French Sloan (1871), American painter and illustrator; and George E. Stewart (1872), Australian-American colonel, Medal of Honor recipient.

August 2 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Horace Mann (1859), American educator and politician; "Wild Bill" Hickok (1876), American sheriff; Warren G. Harding (1923), American journalist and politician, 29th president of the United States; and Harvey Spencer Lewis (1939), American mystic and author.

8 entries, 215 years, one square on the calendar. August 2 is a reminder that history is experienced as an ordinary day before it is remembered as a date.