There are dates that reach. July 20 has, on at least three occasions across the twentieth century, been the date on which human beings attempted something they were not certain they could survive — and found out, in very different ways, what certainty was worth. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing a kilogram of plastic explosive under a table in the Wolf’s Lair, Adolf Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia.

History does not usually return to the same address. It prefers to move on, to rearrange the furniture in a new room, to pretend it is doing something for the first time. But occasionally a date refuses to let it do that. June 28 is one of those dates — a calendar address that history has knocked on three times, each time with a different face and the same obscure necessity.

“Beware the Ides of March” is advice Rome gave the world, and the world has spent two thousand years testing whether it applies only to the original recipient. The evidence is mixed. March 15 has not always been violent. But it has, with some regularity, been the day someone discovers that the position they thought they held has already been vacated. On March 15, 44 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar arrived at the Theatre of Pompey for a meeting of the Senate and was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators who believed they were saving the republic.

Some dates specialize. May 7 has, across three separate centuries and two world wars, developed a recurring relationship with the moment empires and armies admit they cannot continue. The pattern is not coincidence. It is the calendar doing what it does — accumulating weight until a date no longer belongs only to the year it inhabits. On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was struck by a German torpedo fourteen miles off the southern coast of Ireland.

The armistice ending the First World War was signed at 5:10 AM on November 11, 1918, in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, north of Paris. It was agreed to take effect at 11 AM — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — a time chosen for its symbolic tidiness. The six hours between signature and cessation were not a logistical necessity. The war could have stopped at 5:10.

The Germans have a word for it: Schicksalstag. Fate day. November 9 is theirs — not by design, not by any organizing intelligence, but through a series of violent coincidences that accumulated over seventy years until the date itself seemed to carry a kind of national gravity, pulling catastrophe and liberation alike into its orbit. It began, by most reckonings, in 1918. On November 9 of that year, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the German throne, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty after 500 years.

Every act of transmission carries a gap between what is sent and what arrives. October 29 has marked three of them — three moments in which a signal traveled from its source, and something was lost, or altered, or arrived as something entirely different from what was intended. On October 29, 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. He had been the most glamorous figure of the Elizabethan age — explorer, poet, courtier, the man credited with introducing tobacco to England, the man who had sent two expeditions to find El Dorado and returned, each time, without it.

The mythology of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris has been so thoroughly processed into glamour that the actual conditions of the period have become nearly unrecognizable inside it: a city still rebuilding after the war, full of American expatriates living cheaply on the dollar-franc exchange rate, several of them drinking themselves toward early death, most of them producing work of lasting importance under circumstances that were genuinely precarious and not always recognizably fun.

There are days that do not begin wars. They announce them — standing at the edge of what has already been set in motion, making official what everyone has already understood. September 3 has had that function more than once: the date that formalizes an ending, ratifies a beginning, or simply states aloud what the situation already was. On September 3, 1783, American and British representatives signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.

Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, arrived as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1799 and left, between 1801 and 1812, with approximately half the surviving sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. This is the basic fact around which everything else — the legal argument, the cultural argument, the moral argument, the counter-argument, and the occasional productive silence — has been organized for the better part of two centuries.