July 10

July 10 is the 192nd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1778 to 1999 — a span of 221 years. The entry that anchors it: U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoes a bill that would re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, 1832.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1778, American Revolution — Louis XVI of France declares war on the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoes a bill that would re-charter the Second Bank of the United States. Then, in 1850, U.S. President Millard Fillmore is sworn in, a day after becoming president upon Zachary Taylor's death.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1890, Wyoming is admitted as the 44th U.S. state.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1945, three African-American United States Marines who repeatedly raped local women in Katsuyama near Nago, Okinawa were killed by the residents and had their bodies hidden in a nearby cave for over 50 years.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement, one of the most ambitious civil-rights campaigns in the northern United States. Then, in 1978, Moktar Ould Daddah, the first president of Mauritania, was ousted in a coup d'état led by Mustafa Ould Salek.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1999, in women's association football, the United States defeats China in a penalty shoot-out at the Rose Bowl near Los Angeles to win the final match of the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup. Watched by 90,185 spectators, the final sets a new world record for attendance at a women's sporting event.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on July 10: David Humphreys (soldier) (1752), American Revolutionary War colonel, politician, foreign minister and entrepreneur.; George M. Dallas (1792), American lawyer and politician, 11th Vice President of the United States; Emma Smith (1804), American religious leader; Alvan Graham Clark (1832), American astronomer; and Nikola Tesla (1856), Serbian-American electrical and mechanical engineer.

July 10 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Clement Clarke Moore (1863), American author and educator; Paul Morphy (1884), American chess player; Phoebe Knapp (1908), American organist and composer; and Jelly Roll Morton (1941), American pianist, composer, and bandleader.

Read end to end, July 10 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 221 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.