May 12

May 12 is the 133rd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1780 to 2015 — a span of 235 years. The entry that anchors it: American Revolutionary War, 1780.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1780, American Revolutionary War — in the largest defeat of the Continental Army, Charleston, South Carolina is taken by British forces.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1846, the Donner Party, an American pioneer group which became known for resorting to cannibalism when they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada, left Independence, Missouri, for California. Then, in 1862, American Civil War — Union Army troops occupy Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A year later, in 1863, Battle of Raymond — two divisions of James B. McPherson's XVII Corps turn the left wing of Confederate General John C. Pemberton's defensive line on Fourteen Mile Creek, opening up the interior of Mississippi to the Union Army during the Vicksburg Campaign.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which restricts agricultural production through government purchase of livestock for slaughter and paying subsidies to farmers when they remove land from planting, is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nine years on, in 1942, World War II — the U.S. tanker SS Virginia is torpedoed in the mouth of the Mississippi River by the German submarine U-507.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 2002, Former US President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a five-day visit with Fidel Castro, becoming the first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since the Cuban Revolution. Then, in 2015, a train derailment in Philadelphia, United States, kills eight people and injures more than 200.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 12: Henry Cabot Lodge (1850), American historian and politician; William Alden Smith (1859), American lawyer and politician; Lincoln Ellsworth (1880), American explorer; William Giauque (1895), Canadian-American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate; and Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895), Indian-American philosopher and author.

May 12 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: J. E. B. Stuart (1864), American general; Amy Lowell (1925), American poet and critic; Max Brand (1944), American journalist and author; and Hans Waldemar Wessolowski (1948), German-American illustrator.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 235 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.