August 6 has a gift for endings that contain beginnings, and beginnings that contain, somewhere inside them, a kind of ending. The date does not repeat itself — no two of its significant moments share a century — but they share a structure: something that had always seemed permanent is suddenly, irreversibly gone, and something else steps into the space it occupied. On August 6, 1806, Emperor Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

Some dates produce men and moments that do not make sense until later. January 17 has a particular talent for this — for the warning given too soon to be heard, for the survival that arrives at too high a cost, for the birth of a mind that its own era could not fully contain. On January 17, 1706, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children of a candle and soap maker.

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.

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.