December 13

December 13 is the 348th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1623 to 2003 — a span of 380 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1862.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1623, the Plymouth Colony establishes the system of trial by 12-men jury in the American colonies. Then, in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony organizes three militia regiments to defend the colony against the Pequot Indians, a date now considered the founding of the National Guard of the United States.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1862, American Civil War — Union forces under Ambrose Burnside suffered severe casualties against entrenched Confederate defenders at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1928, an American in Paris, a jazz-influenced orchestral piece by George Gershwin, premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1962, NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit. Ten years on, in 1972, Apollo program — Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin the third and final extra-vehicular activity (EVA) or "Moonwalk" of Apollo 17. To date they are the last humans to set foot on the Moon. Then, in 1988, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat gives a speech at a UN General Assembly meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, after United States authorities refused to grant him a visa to visit UN headquarters in New York.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2003, Operation Red Dawn — Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is captured near his home town of Tikrit.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 13: Emil Seidel (1864), American woodcarver and politician, 36th Mayor of Milwaukee; Edward LeSaint (1870), American actor and director; Jane Edna Hunter (1882), African-American social worker; Belle da Costa Greene (1883), American librarian and bibliographer; and Annie Dale Biddle Andrews (1885), American mathematician.

December 13 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb (1862), American general, lawyer, and politician; Arthur Wesley Dow (1922), American painter and photographer; Robert Robinson Taylor (1942), American architect; and Henry James (1947), American lawyer and author.

Read end to end, December 13 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 380 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.