Today In History
Example Questions That Can Be Answered Using This FAQ
- What happened on the day I was born?
- I need events of the 1960s.
Many patrons ask us about sites that provide historical information based on the date on which the historical events occurred. There are some sites that do include this kind of information, and we have provided a short guide to them here.
Anyday In History, from Scope Systems (an industrial electronics repair company), offers a very simple interface: menus that allow you to select a month and day. If you are looking for events in a particular month, day, and year, this may not be the best site for you, because not every year is included in the list. The historical events listed for each year are also a bit random: for instance, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, this event of global importance was not noted.
HistoryNet’s Today in History Search is similar, but also includes some hypertext links to longer articles about the historical events mentioned.
"Capitol Hill Blue: Today In History" is also similar, but with separate lists for "Famous Births" and "Famous Deaths".
The Today in History Archive from the Library of Congress’ American Memory project is another place that you can search or browse. It will highlight only one or two events for a particular day, but the accompanying text, photos, and links make it a great resource.
dMarie Time Capsule, lets you enter in a specific day in history from 1900 to 1999. Once you do that, you get information on the top news headlines from that quarter, price of a house, car, milk, gas and other items during that year, and entertainment news such as Academy Award winners, Top Songs, and Sports Headlines from that year. Take note that none of this information is specific information about that particular day.
If you’re looking for events that happened during a particular year or decade, you may find these sites to be more helpful:
The Information Please Almanac’s Headline History section "provides a chronology of worldwide historical events from ancient to modern times." This site is especially useful for getting a list of world events that happened during a particular year.
For historical entertainment or sports related events like who won the Best Actor Oscar in 1986, check out Information Please’s Entertainment Almanac and Sports Almanac.
Alternately, try this new site that Information Please has made available, called Millenium Central. Here, you will find Year-by-Year and Decade-by-Decade chronologies of the 20th century, as well as a "Best and Worst of the Century" feature.
Yahoo’s 20th Century U.S. History category is sorted into decades, so you can search in, for instance, the "1970s" category for sites about different aspects of the seventies.
You can also research particular days in (fairly recent) history by searching the newspaper collection at your local public library. If you are interested in getting events from a particular decade, you may want to see if your library owns the American Decades series from Gale Research, which describes events in business, sports, and politics.
And of course, once you find a particular event that happened on the day in which you are interested, you can do further research on the event.
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