September 5

September 5 is the 249th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1781 to 1977 — a span of 196 years. The entry that anchors it: Russo-Japanese War, 1905.

In the founding decades, the date sat close to the business of building a republic. In 1781, American Revolutionary War — French naval forces handed Britain a major strategic defeat at the Battle of the Chesapeake. The same year, Battle of the Chesapeake in the American Revolutionary War: The British Navy is repelled by the French Navy, contributing to the British surrender at Yorktown.

Through the nineteenth century the date gathered the tensions that would define the era. In 1862, American Civil War — the Army of Northern Virginia crosses the Potomac River at White's Ford in the Maryland Campaign.

In the decades after the Civil War, the date marked a country remaking itself. In 1877, American Indian Wars — Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse is bayoneted by a United States soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.

As the country moved into the modern age, the date accumulated new kinds of firsts. In 1905, Russo-Japanese War — in New Hampshire, United States, the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, ends the war. Then, in 1945, Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese American who broadcast under the name Orphan Annie during World War II, is arrested in Yokohama by U.S. military authorities amid widespread speculation of her being wartime radio propagandist Tokyo Rose.

In the postwar decades the date belonged to a nation of enormous reach and unfinished arguments. In 1975, Squeaky Fromme, a devotee of Charles Manson, attempted to assassinate U.S. president Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California. Two years on, in 1977, NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1, currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth, from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on September 5: Lester Allan Pelton (1829), American inventor; George Huntington Hartford (1833), American businessman; Jesse James (1847), American outlaw; Thomas E. Watson (1856), American lawyer, publisher, and politician; and Amy Beach (1867), American pianist and composer.

September 5 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Crazy Horse (1877), American tribal leader; Sarah Emma Edmonds (1898), Canadian-American nurse, soldier, and spy; Robert Harron (1920), American actor; and Robert Means Thompson (1930), American soldier, businessman, and philanthropist.

The date carries formal observance as well — International Day of Charity. Taken together, the 8 entries on September 5 span 196 years of American life. A date is an arbitrary container, but what fills it is not arbitrary at all.