About A Day in the Past

A Day in the Past is a history calendar for children, families and schools. Pick any day of the year and find out what happened on that date — UK history first, with the rest of the world, famous birthdays and special days too.

What you’ll find

• A six-week planner on the home page: this week and the next five, Monday to Sunday, with each day’s top stories.
• A page for every day of the year — all 366 of them, including 29 February — listing everything we have for that date.
• Fun extras built from real history: “How long ago?” time-machine trips, a quick quiz and a printable worksheet for every day.
• Explorer badges that sort stories into topics such as kings and queens, space, inventions and sport.

Where the history comes from

The lists of events, births, deaths and special days come from Wikipedia’s “On this day” pages, which we load through the free Wikimedia API. To choose which birthdays to show, we use Wikidata to see how many different language Wikipedias have an article about each person — a handy clue to how well known they are.

For the stories at the top of each day we write our own short, child-friendly versions, checked against the linked articles. Entries we haven’t rewritten yet show Wikipedia’s own wording, with a link to the article it comes from. Our terms page explains the licences.

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons and other openly licensed collections, and every one is credited where it appears and on our photo credits page. Videos come from the official channels of museums, broadcasters and space agencies, and only load from YouTube when you press play.

Keeping it suitable for children

History includes wars, disasters and crimes. We think children should be able to learn about the past without stumbling on upsetting details, so entries that mention things like killings, disasters or terrorism are kept out of the calendar and tucked away in a closed “For older readers” section at the bottom of each day page, with a content note. This sorting is done by an automatic check first, so it isn’t perfect — if you spot something that’s in the wrong place, please tell us.

A note about old dates

Before 1752, Britain used an older calendar called the Julian calendar, and many other countries switched at different times. That means some very old events may be listed on different dates in different books. We follow the dates given in our sources.

Get in touch

Found a mistake, or know a great story we’ve missed? We’d love to hear from you — see our contact page.