September 17

September 17 is the 261st day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1775 to 2001 — a span of 226 years. The entry that anchors it: American Revolutionary War, 1775.

Before there was a United States, the date already carried weight in the colonies. In 1775, American Revolutionary War — the Continental Army under Richard Montgomery began the Siege of Fort St. Jean in the British province of Quebec.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in the U.S. state of Maryland, and later orchestrated the rescues of other slaves via the Underground Railroad. Ten years on, in 1859, Disgruntled with the legal and political structures of the United States, Joshua Norton distributed letters to various newspapers in San Francisco proclaiming himself to be Emperor Norton. Three years on, in 1862, American Civil War — Almost 23,000 total casualties were suffered at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Confederate and Union troops fought to a tactical stalemate. The same year, American Civil War — George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac halts the first invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia in the single-day Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1976, the Space Shuttle Enterprise is unveiled by NASA. Nine years on, in 1985, four years after AIDS was first identified in the United States, Ronald Reagan publicly acknowledged AIDS (video featured) for the first time.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2001, George W. Bush, president of the United States, delivers remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington praising Muslim Americans and condemning Islamophobia in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on September 17: Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730), Prussian-American general; John Rutledge (1739), American judge and politician, 2nd Chief Justice of the United States; Jonathan Alder (1773), American captain and farmer; Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II (1825), American jurist and politician, 16th United States Secretary of the Interior; and David Dunbar Buick (1854), Scottish-American businessman, founded Buick Motor Company.

September 17 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Benjamin Bourne (1808), American judge and politician; Dred Scott (1858), American slave, plaintiff in the Dred Scott Decision; Lawrence O'Bryan Branch (1862), American politician and Confederate general; and Roman Nose (1868), Native American warrior (born circa 1823).

The date carries formal observance as well — Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, observed on the previous Friday if it falls on a Saturday, the following Monday if on a Sunday; and the beginning of the Constitution Week (United States). Taken together, the 8 entries on September 17 span 226 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.