March 15

March 15 is the 75th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1783 to 1990 — a span of 207 years. The entry that anchors it: President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1783, George Washington delivered a speech to Continental Army officers in Newburgh, New York, asking them to support the supremacy of the Congress of the Confederation, defusing a potential coup.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1820, Maine is admitted as the twenty-third U.S. state. Three years on, in 1823, American sailor Benjamin Morrell erroneously reported the existence of New South Greenland, a phantom island, near Antarctica.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1875, John McCloskey, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, was created the first cardinal from the United States.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1916, six days after Pancho Villa and his cross-border raiders attacked Columbus, New Mexico, U.S. general John J. Pershing led a punitive expedition into Mexico to pursue him.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1960, students from the Atlanta University Center, inspired by similar actions in Greensboro, North Carolina, began occupying lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia. Five years on, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the Selma crisis, tells the U.S. Congress "We shall overcome" while advocating the Voting Rights Act.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first and only President of the Soviet Union.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 15: Andrew Jackson (1767), American general, judge, and politician, 7th President of the United States; Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809), American-Liberian historian and politician, 1st President of Liberia; Hallie Quinn Brown (1845), African-American educator, writer and activist; John Sebastian Little (1851), American lawyer and politician, Governor of Arkansas; and Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858), American botanist and academic, co-founded the American Society for Horticultural Science.

March 15 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Sam Dreben (1925), American soldier and mercenary; H. P. Lovecraft (1937), American short story writer, editor, and novelist; Rachel Field (1942), American author and poet; and Lester Young (1959), American saxophonist and clarinet player.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day To Combat Islamophobia and National Day, celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (Hungary). Taken together, the 8 entries on March 15 span 207 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.