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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.

Explore the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) On This Day page, "a showcase of some of the most significant as well as some of the quirkier stories broadcast by BBC News since 1950 and now including a new World War II section." Events that happened today appear on the front page, but you can also explore by theme/subject and also read first-hand accounts by people who witnessed historical events. Offers an RSS feed as well.

Deutsche Welle, "Germany's international broadcaster" offers this Today in History page, which provides historical events, birthdays, and a daily quiz.

The History Channel’s This Day in History (TDIH) offers a smorgasbord of subject- and date-categorized information related to today, this week, or any day of the year. For this week in history, watch video clips that you can link to and email, or get links to them. Get TDIH text alerts and widgets (for Facebook, MySpace, websites, etc.) or sign up for the email newsletter.

HistoryNet’s Today in History Search is similar, but also includes some hypertext links to longer articles about the historical events mentioned.

HistoryOrb.com may be one of the most comprehensive websites that provides information about historical events that happened today. Search and browse over 200,000 events, birthdays, and deaths by date and keyword.

This Day in History from Infoplease is another source for information about historical events that happened today. Lets you search for events by year and day and also look up famous birthdays.

The On this Day page on the History Today magazine's website lets you choose a month and day (or just click "Today") and see births, deaths, and events that happened on any day of the year. A picture is provided for the first event listed. There are also links to relevant History Today magazine articles. For free, you can read an excerpt of the article and obtain bibliographic/citation information for it.

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.

Yahoo! News and The Associated Press offer this Today in History page, which offers a number of ways to share and subscribe (Facebook, Delicious, RSS, MySpace, email, etc.) to this inofrmation..

If you’re looking for events that happened during a particular year or decade, some of the sites above can help you, but you also may want to check the following sites:

The Information Please Almanac’s World 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 Arts & Entertainment Almanac and Sports Almanac.

Alternately, try Information Please’s Year by Year. Here, you will find "Year by Year" and "Decade by Decade" chronologies of the 20th century, as well as timelines on many subjects.

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.