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.

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.