Free, no key required. Historical events, births and deaths for any day of the year.
Stored in full in our own database and re-synced periodically. The English dataset is the more comprehensive one — several hundred entries per day across events, births and deaths, covering all 366 days including Feb 29; BC years are negative numbers. A Chinese edition better suited for readers in China is also provided — just pass lang=zh. Data obtained from Wikipedia under the CC BY-SA license.
Base path /v1/history. All endpoints are GET and return {code, message, data}. Add lang=en for English error messages.
GET /v1/history/today Today| Parameter | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| tz | Asia/Shanghai | Timezone that defines "today" (IANA name) |
| type | all | Optional event / birth / death to return a single group |
| desc | omitted | Pass 1 to include a plain-text description per entry (only the Chinese data has descriptions; English entries have none) |
Request: /v1/history/today
Response (excerpt): {"code":0,"message":"ok","data":{"month":11,"day":12,"date":"2026-11-12","counts":{"event":63,"birth":187,"death":99,"total":349},"events":[{"year":954,"text":"The 13-year-old Lothair III is crowned at the Abbey of Saint-Remi as king of France."},…]}}
GET /v1/history/day A specific date| Parameter | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| month | required | 1–12 |
| day | required | Must fit the month (February counts 29 days) |
| type | all | Optional event / birth / death |
| desc | omitted | Pass 1 to include a plain-text description per entry (only the Chinese data has descriptions; English entries have none) |
Request: /v1/history/day?month=11&day=12&type=birth
Response (excerpt): {"code":0,"message":"ok","data":{"month":11,"day":12,"counts":{"event":63,"birth":187,"death":99,"total":349},"births":[{"year":1840,"text":"Auguste Rodin, French sculptor (d. 1917)"},…]}}
The On This Day endpoints have been called 4 times in total · 4 today. See the full usage stats.
| Endpoint | Path | Today | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | /v1/history/today | 2 | 2 |
| By date | /v1/history/day | 2 | 2 |
| Index | /v1/history | 0 | 0 |