March 8

March 8 is the 68th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1655 to 2001 — a span of 346 years. The entry that anchors it: Cold War, 1983.

The colonial record reaches this date first. In 1655, the court of Northampton County, Virginia, issued a ruling that made John Casor the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared a slave for life as a result of a civil suit. Then, in 1775, an anonymous writer, thought by some to be Thomas Paine, publishes "African Slavery in America", the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.

In the years around independence, the date turns political. In 1782, Gnadenhutten massacre — Ninety-six Native Americans in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, who had converted to Christianity, are killed by Pennsylvania militiamen in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indian tribes.

In the first half of the twentieth century the date turns technological. In 1917, the United States Senate votes to limit filibusters by adopting the cloture rule. Seven years on, in 1924, three violent explosions at a coal mine near Castle Gate, Utah, killed all 171 miners working there.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1949, President of France Vincent Auriol and ex-Vietnamese emperor Bảo Đại sign the Élysée Accords, giving Vietnam greater independence from France and creating the State of Vietnam to oppose Viet Minh-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Then, in 1983, Cold War — in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, U.S. president Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire"

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 2001, Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-102, carrying the Expedition 2 crew to the International Space Station.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 8: Simon Cameron (1799), American journalist and politician, United States Secretary of War; Alvan Clark (1804), American astronomer and telescope maker; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841), American lawyer and jurist; Frank Avery Hutchins (1851), American librarian and educator; and Colin Campbell Cooper (1856), American painter and academic.

March 8 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Millard Fillmore (1874), American lawyer and politician, 13th President of the United States; Henry Ward Beecher (1887), American minister and activist; James Buchanan Eads (1887), American engineer, designed the Eads Bridge; and John Ericsson (1889), Swedish-American engineer.

March 8 carries 8 entries spread across 346 years. None of the people in them knew they were sharing a date; that is a pattern only visible looking back.