December 7

December 7 is the 342nd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1787 to 2005 — a span of 218 years. The entry that anchors it: Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1787, Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1862, American Civil War — the Battle of Prairie Grove ended a Confederate attempt to regain control of northwestern Arkansas.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1930, W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts telecasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The telecast also includes the first television advertisement in the United States, for I.J. Fox Furriers, which also sponsored the radio show. Then, in 1941, Attack on Pearl Harbor — the Imperial Japanese Navy carries out a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1946, a fire at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia kills 119 people, the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history. Then, in 1963, instant replay makes its debut during the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Then, in 1982, in Texas, Charles Brooks Jr., becomes the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2005, Rigoberto Alpizar, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 924 who allegedly claimed to have a bomb, is shot and killed by a team of U.S. federal air marshals at Miami International Airport.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on December 7: John Littlejohn (1756), American sheriff and Methodist preacher; Richard Warren Sears (1863), American businessman, co-founded Sears; Willa Cather (1873), American novelist, short story writer, and poet; Rudolf Friml (1879), Czech-American pianist, composer, and academic; and John Carpenter (1884), American sprinter.

December 7 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Richard Bellingham (1672), English-American lawyer and politician, 8th Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; Thomas Nast (1902), German-American cartoonist; Nicholas Murray Butler (1947), American philosopher and academic, Nobel Prize laureate; and Rex Beach (1949), American author, playwright, and water polo player.

The date carries formal observance as well — National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (United States). Read end to end, December 7 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 218 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.