June 7

June 7 is the 159th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1776 to 1998 — a span of 222 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 — Richard Henry Lee proposes the "Lee Resolution" to the Second Continental Congress, with the motion being seconded by John Adams and leading to the United States Declaration of Independence.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1862, the United States and the United Kingdom agree in the Lyons–Seward Treaty to suppress the African slave trade.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1866, one thousand eight hundred Fenian raiders are repelled back to the United States after looting and plundering the Saint-Armand and Frelighsburg areas of Canada East.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1948, in Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., a New York trial court declined to issue a permanent injunction in favor of several Soviet composers against the distribution of The Iron Curtain, the first anti-Soviet Hollywood film of the Cold War era. Then, in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated the "right to marital privacy" Six years on, in 1971, the United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The same year, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service raids the home of Ken Ballew for illegal possession of hand grenades.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1998, White supremacists murdered James Byrd Jr., an African American, by chaining him behind a pickup truck and dragging him along an asphalt road in Jasper, Texas.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on June 7: Susan Blow (1843), American educator; George Washington Ball (1847), American legislator from Iowa; Bones Ely (1863), American baseball player and manager; Roelof Klein (1877), Dutch-American rower and engineer; and Sylvanus Morley (1883), American archaeologist and scholar.

June 7 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Alexander Spotswood (1740), Moroccan-American colonial and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia; Benjamin Tupper (1792), American general and surveyor; Chief Seattle (1866), American tribal chief; and Charles Reed Bishop (1915), American banker and politician, founded the First Hawaiian Bank.

Taken together, the 8 entries on June 7 span 222 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.