May 2

May 2 is the 123rd day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1670 to 2012 — a span of 342 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1863.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1670, King Charles II of England grants a permanent charter to the Hudson's Bay Company to open up the fur trade in North America.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1863, American Civil War — Stonewall Jackson is wounded by friendly fire while returning to camp after reconnoitering during the Battle of Chancellorsville. He succumbs to pneumonia eight days later.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1945, World War II — a death march from Dachau to the Austrian border is halted by the segregated, all-Nisei 522nd Field Artillery Battalion of the U.S. Army in southern Bavaria, saving several hundred prisoners.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1964, Vietnam War — an explosion sinks the American aircraft carrier USNS Card while it is docked at Saigon. Two Viet Cong combat swimmers had placed explosives on the ship's hull. She is raised and returned to service less than seven months later.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1999, Mireya Moscoso became the first woman to be elected President of Panama. A year later, in 2000, President Bill Clinton announces that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the United States military. Then, in 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI's most wanted fugitive, is killed by the United States Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A year later, in 2012, a pastel version of The Scream, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, sells for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new world record for a work of art at auction.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 2: Elias Boudinot (1740), American lawyer and politician, 10th President of the Continental Congress; Elijah McCoy (1844), Canadian-American engineer; Clyde Fitch (1865), American playwright; Giuseppe Morello (1867), Italian-American mobster; and James F. Byrnes (1879), American stenographer and politician, 49th United States Secretary of State.

May 2 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: James Gates Percival (1856), American poet, surgeon and geologist; Eberhard Anheuser (1880), German-American businessman, co-founded Anheuser-Busch; Homer Davenport (1912), American political cartoonist; and Joe Corbett (1945), American baseball player and journalist.

Taken together, the 8 entries on May 2 span 342 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.