November 14

November 14 is the 319th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1851 to 2008 — a span of 157 years. The entry that anchors it: As a result of budget conflicts between President Bill Clinton and the United States Congress led by Newt Gingrich, 1995.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1851, Moby-Dick, an epic novel by American writer Herman Melville, was first published in the United States.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1960, Ruby Bridges and the McDonogh Three became the first black children to attend an all-white elementary school in Louisiana as part of the New Orleans school desegregation crisis. Seven years on, in 1967, American physicist Theodore Maiman was given a patent for his ruby laser systems, the world's first laser. Two years on, in 1969, Apollo program — NASA launches Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to the surface of the Moon. Ten years on, in 1979, US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive Order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1995, as a result of budget conflicts between President Bill Clinton and the United States Congress led by Newt Gingrich, the federal government was forced to shut down non-essential services. The same year, a budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs. Then, in 2008, the first G-20 economic summit opens in Washington, D.C.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on November 14: Robert Fulton (1765), American engineer, early steamboat pioneer; Nathaniel Claiborne (1777), American farmer and politician; Jacob Abbott (1803), American author; James B. McPherson (1828), American general; and Madeleine Lemoyne Ellicott (1856), American activist.

November 14 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1832), American farmer and politician; John La Farge (1910), American artist; Booker T. Washington (1915), American educator, essayist and historian; and Jack O'Connor (1937), American baseball player and manager.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 157 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.