May 26

May 26 is the 147th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1783 to 1998 — a span of 215 years. The entry that anchors it: The U.S. Congress passes Public Law 80-557, 1948.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1783, a Great Jubilee Day held at North Stratford, Connecticut, celebrates the end of fighting in the American Revolutionary War.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signs legislation organizing the Montana Territory. A year later, in 1865, Conclusion of the American Civil War — the Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi division, is the last full general of the Confederate Army to surrender, at Galveston, Texas.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1868, Impeachment of Andrew Johnson — President Andrew Johnson is acquitted by one vote in the United States Senate.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee was established to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities by people or organizations in the U.S. suspected of having communist or fascist ties.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1948, the U.S. Congress passes Public Law 80-557, which permanently establishes the Civil Air Patrol as an auxiliary of the United States Air Force. Then, in 1969, Apollo program — Apollo 10 returns to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the forthcoming first crewed Moon landing.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 1998, the Supreme Court of the United States rules in New Jersey v. New York that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 26: Robert W. Chambers (1865), American author and illustrator; W. Otto Miessner (1880), American composer and educator; Mamie Smith (1883), American singer, actress, dancer, and pianist; Al Jolson (1886), American singer and actor; and Paul Lukas (1894), Hungarian-American actor and singer.

May 26 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Almon Brown Strowger (1902), American soldier and inventor; Jacob August Riis (1914), Danish-American journalist, photographer, and reformer; Victor Herbert (1924), Irish-American cellist, composer, and conductor, founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; and William H. Shockley (1925), American mining engineer, amateur photographer, and hobbyist botanist.

The date carries formal observance as well — National Paper Airplane Day (United States). Taken together, the 8 entries on May 26 span 215 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.