January 30

January 30 is the 30th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1806 to 1989 — a span of 183 years. The entry that anchors it: In the United States, 1956.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1806, the original Lower Trenton Bridge (also called the Trenton Makes the World Takes Bridge), which spans the Delaware River between Morrisville, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey, is opened. Then, in 1835, in the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself. Then, in 1847, Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California. Then, in 1862, the United States Navy launched USS Monitor, the first American ironclad warship.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1956, in the United States, Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s home is bombed in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott. Then, in 1968, Vietnam War — Tet Offensive launch by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army against South Vietnam, the United States, and their allies. Seven years on, in 1975, the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary is established as the first United States National Marine Sanctuary. Then, in 1989, the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan is closed.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on January 30: John Lansing Jr. (1754), American lawyer and politician; Nathaniel P. Banks (1816), American general and politician, 24th Governor of Massachusetts; Richard Theodore Greener (1844), American lawyer, academic, and diplomat; Charles Martin Loeffler (1861), German-American violinist and composer; and Walter Damrosch (1862), German-American conductor and composer.

January 30 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Betsy Ross (1836), American seamstress, said to have designed the American Flag; Osceola (1838), American tribal leader; Barbara La Marr (1926), American actress; and Frank Nelson Doubleday (1934), American publisher, founded the Doubleday Publishing Company.

Read end to end, January 30 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 183 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.