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I am looking for some sort of collection of significant historical dates. Things like:

  • 4 July 1776, Signing of the Declaration of Independence
  • 15 April 1912, Sinking of the RMS Titanic

Obviously, one can find examples in places like Wikipedia, but they tend to be highly specific to a certain topic, and more importantly, in no consistent format.

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  • How many dates do you need at minimum in your collection? – Nicolas Raoul Dec 8 '14 at 12:35
  • Well the more to better, but I was looking for something on the order of at around 5000 or so. It also depends on how general purpose the data set is. – krfkeith Dec 8 '14 at 17:26
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You can find datasets like this from Universities (particularly history depts.). Here's a few:

University of Pittsburg: http://www.dataverse.pitt.edu/external/datasets.php

University of North Texas: http://www.paulhensel.org/icowcol.html

University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.sage.wisc.edu/download/crop1700/hist_croplands.html

Uppsalla University: http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset/

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In addition to Andrew's response, I did also end up finding this Google Code project: https://code.google.com/p/today-in-history/

While it looks like the database has well over 100,000 events. Unfortunately, it also looks like some of them have spelling errors. And perhaps even worse, many of the dates seem to only have "dummy" values for the day/month as January 1st. In any case, this might prove useful to someone here. On the plus side, the data is explicitly licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

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