May 28

May 28 is the 149th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1754 to 2002 — a span of 248 years. The entry that anchors it: The last steel girder is removed from the original World Trade Center site. Cleanup duties officially end with closing ceremonies at Ground Zero in Manhattan, 2002.

The colonial record reaches this date first. In 1754, French and Indian War — in the first engagement of the war, Virginia militia under the 22-year-old Lieutenant colonel George Washington defeat a French reconnaissance party in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in what is now Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the date carries heavier freight. In 1830, U.S. president Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, authorizing him to negotiate with Native Americans for their removal from their ancestral homelands.

In the postwar nineteenth century the date tracks a nation rebuilding. In 1892, Scottish-American preservationist John Muir founded the environmental organization Sierra Club in California.

The postwar entries show a nation both expanding and contesting itself. In 1977, the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, is engulfed by fire, killing 165 people inside.

Closer to the present, the date is still accumulating. In 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton's former business partners in the Whitewater land deal, Jim McDougal and Susan McDougal, and the Governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker, are convicted of fraud. Two years on, in 1998, Nuclear testing — Pakistan responds to a series of nuclear tests by India with five of its own codenamed Chagai-I, prompting the United States, Japan, and other nations to impose economic sanctions. Pakistan celebrates Youm-e-Takbir annually. Four years on, in 2002, the last steel girder is removed from the original World Trade Center site. Cleanup duties officially end with closing ceremonies at Ground Zero in Manhattan, New York City.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 28: Edward Livingston (1764), American jurist and politician, 11th United States Secretary of State; Louis Agassiz (1807), Swiss-American paleontologist and geologist; P. G. T. Beauregard (1818), American general; Tony Pastor (1837), American impresario, variety performer and theatre owner; and Santo Trafficante Sr. (1886), Italian-American mobster.

May 28 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Noah Webster (1843), American lexicographer; Kicking Bear (1904), Native American tribal leader; Carter Glass (1946), American publisher and politician, 47th United States Secretary of the Treasury; and Terry Dillon (1964), American football player.

7 entries, 248 years, one square on the calendar. May 28 is a reminder that history is experienced as an ordinary day before it is remembered as a date.