August 3

August 3 is the 216th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1829 to 2005 — a span of 176 years. The entry that anchors it: Santa Claus Land, 1946.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1829, the Treaty of Lewistown is signed by the Shawnee and Seneca peoples, exchanging land in Ohio for land west of the Mississippi River. Then, in 1859, the American Dental Association is founded in Niagara Falls, New York.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1921, Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis confirms the ban of the eight Chicago Black Sox, the day after they were acquitted by a Chicago court. Then, in 1936, African-American athlete Jesse Owens won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, dashing Nazi leaders' hopes of Aryan domination at the games.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1946, Santa Claus Land, the world's first themed amusement park, opens in Santa Claus, Indiana, United States. Three years on, in 1949, the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League finalize the merger that would create the National Basketball Association. Then, in 1972, the United States Senate ratifies the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2005, Mauritanian president Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was overthrown in a military coup while he attended the funeral of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on August 3: Hamilton Fish (1808), American lawyer and politician, 26th United States Secretary of State; Elisha Otis (1811), American businessman, founded the Otis Elevator Company; Thomas Francis Meagher (1823), Irish-American revolutionary and military leader, territorial governor of Montana; Vernon Louis Parrington (1871), American historian and scholar; and Harry Heilmann (1894), American baseball player and sportscaster.

August 3 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: William B. Ogden (1877), American businessman and politician, 1st Mayor of Chicago; George Inness (1894), American painter; Emile Berliner (1929), German-American inventor and businessman, invented the phonograph; and Thorstein Veblen (1929), American economist and sociologist.

Read end to end, August 3 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 176 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.