May 11

May 11 is the 132nd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1858 to 2022 — a span of 164 years. The entry that anchors it: Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted as the 32nd U.S. state, 1858.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1858, Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1889, Bandits attacked a U.S. Army paymaster's escort in the Arizona Territory, stealing more than $28,000. The same year, an attack upon a U.S. Army paymaster and escort results in the theft of over $28,000 and the award of two Medals of Honor. Five years on, in 1894, in response to a 28-percent wage cut, 4,000 Pullman Palace Car Company workers went on strike in Illinois, bringing rail traffic west of Chicago to a halt.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1910, Glacier National Park was established in the U.S. state of Montana.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1973, Citing government misconduct, Daniel Ellsberg's charges for his involvement in releasing the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times are dismissed.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1996, after the aircraft's departure from Miami, a fire started by improperly handled chemical oxygen generators in the cargo hold of Atlanta-bound ValuJet Airlines Flight 592 causes the Douglas DC-9 to crash in the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 on board. Then, in 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces raid on the Jenin refugee camp.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 11: Chang and Eng Bunker (1811), Siamese-American showmen, the original conjoined twins; Charles W. Fairbanks (1852), American journalist and politician, 26th United States Vice President; Frank Schlesinger (1871), American astronomer and author; Harriet Quimby (1875), American pilot and screenwriter; and Theodore von Kármán (1881), Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, and engineer.

May 11 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Hart (1779), American lawyer and politician; James Colosimo (1920), Italian-American mob boss; William Dean Howells (1920), American novelist, literary critic, and playwright; and Jozef Murgaš (1929), Slovak-American priest, architect, botanist, and painter.

Read end to end, May 11 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 164 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.