February 8

February 8 is the 39th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1693 to 1968 — a span of 275 years. The entry that anchors it: Delaware refuses to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1865.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1693, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the second-oldest institution of higher education in the Thirteen Colonies, is granted a charter by King William III and Queen Mary II.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1837, Richard Mentor Johnson became the only person ever to be elected Vice President of the United States by the Senate. Then, in 1865, Delaware refuses to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, delaying the criminalization of slavery until the amendment's national adoption on December 6, 1865. The amendment is ultimately ratified by Delaware on February 12, 1901, the 92nd anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1887, the Dawes Act is enacted, authorizing the U.S. President to divide Native American tribal land into individual allotments.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1910, William D. Boyce established the Boy Scouts of America, expanding the Scout Movement into the United States. Then, in 1924, the first state execution in the United States by gas chamber takes place in Nevada.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1965, after taking evasive action to avoid a mid-air collision just after taking off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 84 people on board. Three years on, in 1968, American civil rights movement — an attack on Black students from South Carolina State University who are protesting racial segregation leaves three dead and 28 injured in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on February 8: Richard S. Ewell (1817), American general; William Tecumseh Sherman (1820), American general; Kate Chopin (1850), American author; Adella Brown Bailey (1860), American politician and suffragist; and Moses Gomberg (1866), Ukrainian-American chemist and academic.

February 8 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Charles Curtis (1936), American lawyer and politician, 31st Vice President of the United States; Connie Mack (1956), American baseball player and manager; John von Neumann (1957), Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist; and William J. Donovan (1959), American head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Taken together, the 8 entries on February 8 span 275 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.