October 21

October 21 is the 295th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1797 to 2011 — a span of 214 years. The entry that anchors it: The first and second of three treaties were signed near Medicine Lodge, 1867.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1797, in Boston Harbor, the 44-gun United States Navy frigate USS Constitution is launched.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1861, American Civil War — Union forces under Colonel Edward Baker are defeated by Confederate troops in the second major battle of the war.

Reconstruction and the years that followed added their own entries. In 1867, the first and second of three treaties were signed near Medicine Lodge, Kansas, between the United States federal government and several Native American tribes in the Great Plains, requiring them to relocate to areas in present-day western Oklahoma.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. president against lynching in the Deep South.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approves the transfer of all US Army space-related activities to NASA, including most of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Eight years on, in 1967, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam organizes a march of fifty thousand people from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1994, North Korea and the United States signed the Agreed Framework to limit the former's nuclear weapons program and to normalize relations between the two countries. Then, in 2011, Iraq War — President Barack Obama announces that the withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq will be complete by the end of the year.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on October 21: James Clark (1809), American Jesuit; Will Carleton (1845), American poet and journalist; Oswald Avery (1877), Canadian-American physician and microbiologist; Eugene Burton Ely (1886), American soldier and pilot; and Edna Purviance (1895), American actress.

October 21 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Peyton Randolph (1775), American lawyer and politician, 1st President of the Continental Congress; Edward Dickinson Baker (1861), American congressman and colonel; Dorothy Hale (1938), American actress; and William G. Conley (1940), American journalist, lawyer, and politician, 18th Governor of West Virginia.

What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 214 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.