December 19

December 19 is the 354th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1606 to 1998 — a span of 392 years. The entry that anchors it: American Revolutionary War, 1777.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1606, the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery depart England carrying settlers who founded, at Jamestown, Virginia, the first of the thirteen colonies that became the United States.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1777, American Revolutionary War — George Washington's Continental Army goes into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1828, Vice President of the United States John C. Calhoun sparks the Nullification Crisis when he anonymously publishes the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, protesting the Tariff of 1828.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1912, William Van Schaick, captain of the steamship General Slocum which caught fire and killed over one thousand people, is pardoned by U.S. President William Howard Taft after 3+1⁄2 years in Sing Sing prison.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1974, Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as Vice President of the United States under President Gerald Ford under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1995, the United States Government restores federal recognition to the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi Native American tribe. Two years on, in 1997, Titanic, the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time with a worldwide total of more than US$2.2 billion, was released in the United States. A year later, in 1998, President Bill Clinton is impeached by the United States House of Representatives, becoming the second president of the United States to be impeached.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 19: John Winthrop (1714), American astronomer and educator; James J. Archer (1817), American lawyer and general; Mary Livermore (1820), American journalist and activist; George Frederick Bristow (1825), American violinist and composer; and Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1831), American philanthropist.

December 19 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Bayard Taylor (1878), American author and poet; Henry Ware Lawton (1899), American general; Stephen Warfield Gambrill (1938), American lawyer and politician; and Robert Andrews Millikan (1953), American physicist and eugenicist, Nobel Prize laureate.

Read end to end, December 19 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 392 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.