January 27

January 27 is the 27th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 2003 — a span of 227 years. The entry that anchors it: The U.S. Congress approves Indian Territory (in what is present-day Oklahoma), 1825.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1776, American Revolutionary War — Henry Knox's "noble train of artillery" arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nine years on, in 1785, the University of Georgia, the oldest state-chartered public university in the United States, was founded.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1825, the U.S. Congress approves Indian Territory (in what is present-day Oklahoma), clearing the way for forced relocation of the Eastern Indians on the "Trail of Tears" The same year, on the advice of John C. Calhoun, President James Monroe asked Congress to organize Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, laying the groundwork for Indian removal in the United States.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1967, Cold War — the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom sign the Outer Space Treaty in Washington, D.C., banning deployment of nuclear weapons in space, and limiting the usage of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. The same year, Apollo program — astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Then, in 1980, Through cooperation between the U.S. and Canadian governments, six American diplomats secretly escape hostilities in Iran in the culmination of the Canadian Caper.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2003, the first selections for the United States National Recording Registry were announced by the Library of Congress.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on January 27: Eli Whitney Blake (1795), American engineer, invented the Mortise lock; Eunice Hale Waite Cobb (1803), American writer, public speaker, and activist; John Chivington (1821), American colonel and pastor; Richard Taylor (1826), American general, historian, and politician; and Samuel Gompers (1850), English-American labor leader.

January 27 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John James Audubon (1851), French-American ornithologist and painter; Nellie Bly (1922), American journalist and author; John Farrow (1963), Australian-American director, producer, and screenwriter; and Abraham Walkowitz (1965), American painter.

Taken together, the 8 entries on January 27 span 227 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.