March 9

March 9 is the 69th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1841 to 1977 — a span of 136 years. The entry that anchors it: U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted the Emergency Banking Act to the United States Congress, 1933.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the United States v. The Amistad case that captive Africans who had seized control of the ship carrying them had been taken into slavery illegally. Six years on, in 1847, Mexican–American War — the Siege of Veracruz began, the first large-scale amphibious assault conducted by United States military forces. Then, in 1862, American Civil War — in the world's first battle between two ironclad warships, USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw near the mouth of Hampton Roads in Virginia.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1910, a seventeen-month-long strike, which at its peak involved 15,000 coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers across 65 mines, began in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, U.S. Then, in 1933, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted the Emergency Banking Act to the United States Congress, the first of his New Deal policies.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1959, the popular fashion doll Barbie debuted at the American International Toy Fair in New York City. Eight years on, in 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, defected to the United States. Ten years on, in 1977, Twelve gunmen seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., and took 149 hostages in a 39-hour standoff that ended in two deaths.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on March 9: Edwin Forrest (1806), American actor and philanthropist; David Davis (1815), American jurist and politician; Samuel Blatchford (1820), American lawyer and jurist; Amasa Leland Stanford (1824), American businessman and politician, founded Stanford University; and Mary Harris Armor (1863), American suffragist.

March 9 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Sondre Norheim (1897), Norwegian-American skier; Willard Metcalf (1925), American painter and academic; Paul Elmer More (1937), American journalist and critic; and Harry Womack (1974), American singer.

Taken together, the 8 entries on March 9 span 136 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.