February 20

February 20 is the 51st day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1792 to 1943 — a span of 151 years. The entry that anchors it: The U.S. Congress approves the Blaine Act to repeal federal Prohibition in the United States, 1933.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1792, the Postal Service Act, establishing the United States Post Office Department, is signed by United States President George Washington.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1864, American Civil War — the Union Army suffered a one-in-three casualty rate at the Battle of Olustee near Lake City, Florida.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art , today the largest art museum in the United States with a collection of more than two million works, opened in New York.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination program in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Then, in 1931, the U.S. Congress approves the construction of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge by the state of California. Two years on, in 1933, the U.S. Congress approves the Blaine Act to repeal federal Prohibition in the United States, sending the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution to state ratifying conventions for approval. Six years on, in 1939, Madison Square Garden Nazi rally — the largest ever pro-Nazi rally in United States history is convened in Madison Square Garden, New York City, with 20,000 members and sympathizers of the German American Bund present. Four years on, in 1943, the Saturday Evening Post published the first of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms, among the most widely distributed paintings ever produced, in support of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on February 20: William Prescott (1726), American colonel; Luther Martin (1748), American politician; Angelica Schuyler Church (1756), American socialite, sister-in-law to Alexander Hamilton; E. H. Harriman (1848), American businessman and philanthropist; and Jay Johnson Morrow (1870), American engineer and politician, 3rd Governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

February 20 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Lachlan McIntosh (1806), Scottish-American general and politician; William Wallace Lincoln (1862), American son of Abraham Lincoln; P. G. T. Beauregard (1893), American general; and Frederick Douglass (1895), American author and activist (born c. 1818).

Taken together, the 8 entries on February 20 span 151 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.