July 19

July 19 is the 201st day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1701 to 2013 — a span of 312 years. The entry that anchors it: The two-day Seneca Falls Convention, 1848.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1701, representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1848, the two-day Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's-rights and feminist convention held in the United States, opened in Seneca Falls, New York. Then, in 1863, Morgan's Raid — at Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan's raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1934, the rigid airship USS Macon surprises the USS Houston near Clipperton Island with a mail delivery for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, demonstrating its potential for tracking ships at sea.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1969, Chappaquiddick incident — U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy crashes his car into a tidal pond at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. Then, in 1981, in a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French President François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing the Soviet Union had been stealing American technological research and development. A year later, in 1982, in one of the first militant attacks by Hezbollah, David S. Dodge, president of the American University of Beirut, is kidnapped.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2013, the NASA spacecraft Cassini took a photograph of Saturn with Earth in the distance, for which people were invited to "wave at Saturn"

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on July 19: Samuel Colt (1814), American businessman, founded the Colt's Manufacturing Company; Frederic T. Greenhalge (1842), English-American lawyer and politician, 38th Governor of Massachusetts; Edward Charles Pickering (1846), American astronomer and physicist; Lizzie Borden (1860), American woman, tried and acquitted for the murders of her father and step-mother in 1892; and Charles Horace Mayo (1865), American surgeon, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic.

July 19 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Margaret Fuller (1850), American journalist and critic; Abraham H. Cannon (1896), American publisher and religious leader; Rose Hartwick Thorpe (1939), American poet and author; and Odell Shepard (1967), American poet and politician, 66th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.

Taken together, the 8 entries on July 19 span 312 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.