June 28

June 28 is the 180th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 2012 — a span of 236 years. The entry that anchors it: American Revolution, 1776.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1776, American Revolution — Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five present the draft of the United States Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress, which orders it to "lie on the table" for further edits by the assembly. The same year, American Revolutionary War — Thomas Hickey, Continental Army private and bodyguard to General George Washington, is hanged for mutiny and sedition. The same year, American Revolutionary War — the militia of the Province of South Carolina repelled a British attack on Charleston.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1895, the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims ruled that James Reavis's claim to 18,600 sq mi (48,000 km2) of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico was "wholly fictitious and fraudulent"

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1902, the U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1969, in response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, groups of gay and transgender people began demonstrations, a watershed event for the worldwide gay rights movement. Nine years on, in 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court barred quota systems in college admissions but held that affirmative-action programs advantaging minorities were constitutional.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2012, the United States Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 28: William Hooper (1742), American physician, lawyer, and politician; John Meyers (1880), American swimmer and water polo player; Esther Forbes (1891), American historian and author; Carl Spaatz (1891), American general; and Carl Panzram (1892), American serial killer.

June 28 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: James Madison (1836), American academic and politician, 4th President of the United States; Texas Jack Omohundro (1880), American soldier and hunter; Maria Mitchell (1889), American astronomer and academic; and Henry C. Berghoff (1925), German-American politician.

Read end to end, June 28 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 236 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.