May 3

May 3 is the 124th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1802 to 2001 — a span of 199 years. The entry that anchors it: The United States Senate Committee on Armed Services and United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations begin their closed door hearings into the relief of Douglas MacArthur by U.S. President Harry Truman, 1951.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1802, Washington, D.C. is incorporated as a city after Congress abolishes the Board of Commissioners, the District's founding government. The "City of Washington" is given a mayor-council form of government.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1942, Second World War — Japanese forces began an invasion of Tulagi and nearby islands in the British Solomon Islands, enabling them to threaten and intercept supply and communication routes between the United States and Australasia.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable. Three years on, in 1951, the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services and United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations begin their closed door hearings into the relief of Douglas MacArthur by U.S. President Harry Truman. A year later, in 1952, Lieutenant Colonels Joseph O. Fletcher and William P. Benedict of the United States land a plane at the North Pole. Then, in 1963, police in Birmingham, Alabama, used high-pressure water hoses and dogs against civil-rights protesters, bringing scrutiny on racial segregation in the southern United States. Then, in 1978, the first unsolicited bulk commercial email (which would later become known as "spam") is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 2001, the United States loses its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on May 3: Jacob Riis (1849), Danish-American journalist and photographer; George Gore (1854), American baseball player and manager; August Herrmann (1859), American executive in Major League Baseball; Andy Bowen (1867), American boxer; and Emmett Dalton (1871), American criminal.

May 3 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: John Leverett the Younger (1724), American lawyer, academic, and politician; Samuel Ogle (1752), English-American captain and politician, 5th Governor of Restored Proprietary Government; John Winthrop (1779), American mathematician, physicist, and astronomer; and Howard Taylor Ricketts (1910), American pathologist.

The record for May 3 runs 199 years deep across 8 entries. Read in sequence, the date stops being a coincidence and starts being a through-line.