December 1

December 1 is the 336th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1862 to 1991 — a span of 129 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1862.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1862, American Civil War — in his second State of the Union Address, President Abraham Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes gets the first telephone installed in the White House.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1924, the National Hockey League's first United States–based franchise, the Boston Bruins, plays their first game in league play at home, at the still-extant Boston Arena indoor hockey facility. Then, in 1941, the Civil Air Patrol, the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force, was founded.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1955, American Civil Rights Movement — in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city's bus boycott. Nine years on, in 1964, Vietnam War — U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers meet to discuss plans to bomb North Vietnam. Two years on, in 1966, the Pit, one of U.S. college basketball's premier arenas, opened on the campus of the University of New Mexico.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1991, a referendum held to ratify the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine passed with more than 92 percent of the vote.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 1: Julia A. Moore (1847), American poet; Henry Cadbury (1883), American historian, scholar, and academic; Rex Stout (1886), American detective novelist; Cyril Ritchard (1898), Australian-American actor and singer; and Walter Alston (1911), American baseball player and manager.

December 1 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Alfred Thayer Mahan (1914), American captain and historian; José Eustasio Rivera (1928), Colombian-American lawyer and poet; Fred Rose (1954), American pianist, composer, and publisher; and Elizabeth Peratrovich (1958), American civil rights activist.

The date carries formal observance as well — National Day (Myanmar) and Rosa Parks Day (Ohio and Oregon, United States). Read end to end, December 1 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 129 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.