September 20

September 20 is the 264th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1863 to 2011 — a span of 148 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1863.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1863, American Civil War — the Battle of Chickamauga, in northwestern Georgia, ends in a Confederate victory.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1881, U.S. President Chester A. Arthur is sworn in upon the death of James A. Garfield the previous day.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1946, six days after a referendum, King Christian X of Denmark annuls the declaration of independence of the Faroe Islands. Then, in 1984, the Cosby Show, which became one of three U.S. television shows to have the highest ratings five years in a row, premiered with its pilot episode. The same year, a suicide bomber in a car attacks the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing twenty-two people.

In living memory, the date has kept adding to the record. In 2001, in an address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, U.S. President George W. Bush declares a "war on terror" Six years on, in 2007, Between 15,000 and 20,000 protesters march on Jena, Louisiana, United States, in support of six black youths who had been convicted of assaulting a white classmate. Four years on, in 2011, the United States military ended its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, consequently allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on September 20: Benjamin Franklin White (1800), American singer and composer; Frederick Ellsworth Sickels (1819), American inventor; John F. Reynolds (1820), American general; Kate Harrington (1831), American poet and educator; and William H. Illingworth (1844), English-American photographer.

September 20 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Philander Chase (1852), American bishop and educator, founded Kenyon College; Robert R. Hitt (1906), American politician, 13th United States Assistant Secretary of State; George Nichols (1927), American actor, director, and screenwriter; and William Seabrook (1945), American occultist, journalist, and explorer.

Read end to end, September 20 is less a list than a cross-section: 8 entries that happen to share a square on the calendar, separated by as much as 148 years. The coincidence is arbitrary; the accumulation is not.