The table lists what Wikipedia records for the date shown above, oldest year first. Choose another month and day to look up a different date; the list is fetched from the same public source each time.
| 474 | Emperor Leo II dies after a reign of ten months. He is succeeded by his father Zeno, who becomes sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire. |
| 937 | Ten Kingdoms: Li Bian usurps the throne and deposes Emperor Yang Pu. The Wu State is replaced by Li (now called "Xu Zhigao"), who becomes the first ruler of Southern Tang. |
| 1160 | The assassination of Maio of Bari, chancelor of the kingdom of Sicily, leads to a crisis and the arrest of king William I of Sicily. |
| 1202 | Fourth Crusade: Despite letters from Pope Innocent III forbidding it and threatening excommunication, Catholic crusaders begin a siege of Zara (now Zadar, Croatia). |
| 1293 | Raden Wijaya is crowned as the first monarch of Majapahit kingdom of Java, taking the throne name Kertarajasa Jayawardhana. |
| 1444 | Battle of Varna: The crusading forces of King Władysław III of Poland (aka Ulaszlo I of Hungary and Władysław III of Varna) are defeated by the Turks under Sultan Murad II and Władysław is killed. |
| 1599 | Åbo Bloodbath: Fourteen noblemen who opposed Duke Charles are decapitated in the Old Great Square of Turku (Swedish: Åbo) for their involvement in the War against Sigismund. |
| 1659 | Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Maratha King kills Afzal Khan, Adilshahi in the battle popularly known as Battle of Pratapgarh. |
| 1674 | Third Anglo-Dutch War: As provided in the Treaty of Westminster, Netherlands cedes New Netherland to England. |
| 1702 | English colonists under the command of James Moore besiege Spanish St. Augustine during Queen Anne's War. |
| 1766 | The last colonial governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, signs the charter of Queen's College (later renamed Rutgers University). |
| 1775 | The United States Marine Corps is founded at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia by Samuel Nicholas. |
| 1793 | A Goddess of Reason is proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Pierre Gaspard Chaumette. |
| 1821 | Cry of Independence by Rufina Alfaro at La Villa de Los Santos, Panama setting into motion a revolt which led to Panama's independence from Spain and to it immediately becoming part of Colombia. |
| 1847 | The passenger ship Stephen Whitney is wrecked in thick fog off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 92 of the 110 on board. The disaster results in the construction of the Fastnet Rock lighthouse. |
| 1865 | Major Henry Wirz, the superintendent of a prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, is hanged, becoming one of only three American Civil War soldiers executed for war crimes. |
| 1871 | Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" |
| 1898 | White supremacists seized power and massacred black Americans during the Wilmington massacre, the only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in United States history. |
| 1910 | The date of Thomas A. Davis' opening of the San Diego Army and Navy Academy, although the official founding date is November 23, 1910. |
| 1918 | The Western Union Cable Office in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, receives a top-secret coded message from Europe (that would be sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C.) that said on November 11, 1918, all fighting would cease on land, sea and in the air. |
| 1939 | Finnish author F. E. Sillanpää is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. |
| 1940 | The 1940 Vrancea earthquake strikes Romania killing an estimated 1,000 and injuring approximately 4,000 more. |
| 1942 | World War II: Germany invades Vichy France following French Admiral François Darlan's agreement to an armistice with the Allies in North Africa. |
| 1944 | The ammunition ship USS Mount Hood explodes at Seeadler Harbour, Manus, Admiralty Islands, killing at least 432 and wounding 371. |
| 1945 | Heavy fighting in Surabaya between Indonesian nationalists and returning colonialists after World War II, today celebrated as Heroes' Day (Hari Pahlawan). |
| 1946 | A magnitude 6.9 earthquake in the Peruvian Andes mountains kills at least 1,400 people. |
| 1951 | With the rollout of the North American Numbering Plan, direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States. |
| 1954 | U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicates the USMC War Memorial (Iwo Jima memorial) in Arlington Ridge Park in Arlington County, Virginia. |
| 1958 | The Hope Diamond is donated to the Smithsonian Institution by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston. |
| 1967 | The Nauru Independence Act 1967 passed the Parliament of Australia, giving independence to the UN Trust Territory of Nauru with effect from 31 January 1968. |
| 1969 | National Educational Television (the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service) in the United States debuts Sesame Street. |
| 1970 | Luna 17: uncrewed space mission launched by the Soviet Union. |
| 1970 | Vietnam War: Vietnamization: For the first time in five years, an entire week ends with no reports of American combat fatalities in Southeast Asia. |
| 1971 | A Merpati Nusantara Airlines Vickers Viscount crashes into the Indian Ocean near Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia, killing all 69 people on board. |
| 1971 | In Cambodia, Khmer Rouge forces attack the city of Phnom Penh and its airport, killing 44, wounding at least 30 and damaging nine aircraft. |
| 1972 | Southern Airways Flight 49 from Birmingham, Alabama is hijacked and, at one point, is threatened with crashing into the nuclear installation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After two days, the plane lands in Havana, Cuba, where the hijackers are jailed by Fidel Castro. |
| 1975 | Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the United Nations General Assembly passes Resolution 3379, determining that Zionism is a form of racism. |
| 1975 | The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board. |
| 1975 | Treaty of Osimo between Yugoslavia and Italy |
| 1979 | A 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train carrying explosive and poisonous chemicals from Windsor, Ontario, Canada derails in Mississauga, Ontario. |
| 1983 | Bill Gates introduces Windows 1.0. |
| 1985 | A Dassault Falcon 50 and a Piper PA-28 Cherokee collide in mid-air over Fairview, New Jersey, killing six people and injuring eight. |
| 1989 | Germans begin to tear down the Berlin Wall. |
| 1989 | Longtime Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov is removed from office and replaced by Petar Mladenov. |
| 1995 | In Nigeria, playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), are hanged by government forces. |
| 1997 | WorldCom and MCI Communications announce a $37 billion merger (the largest merger in US history at the time). |
| 1999 | World Anti-Doping Agency is formed in Lausanne. |
| 2001 | The Taliban held city of Mazar-i-Sharif falls to the Northern Alliance under generals Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Nur. |
| 2002 | Veteran's Day Weekend Tornado Outbreak: A tornado outbreak stretching from Northern Ohio to the Gulf Coast, one of the largest outbreaks recorded in November. |
| 2006 | Sri Lankan Tamil politician Nadarajah Raviraj is assassinated in Colombo. |
| 2006 | The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia is opened and dedicated by U.S. President George W. Bush, who announces that Marine Corporal Jason Dunham will posthumously receive the Medal of Honor. |
| 2008 | Over five months after landing on Mars, NASA declares the Phoenix mission concluded after communications with the lander were lost. |
| 2009 | Ships of the South and North Korean navies skirmish off Daecheong Island in the Yellow Sea. |
| 2019 | President of Bolivia Evo Morales and several of his government resign after 19 days of civil protests and a recommendation from the military. |
| 2020 | Armenia and Azerbaijan sign a ceasefire agreement, ending the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and prompting protests in Armenia. |
The table lists the events Wikipedia records for one calendar date, today by default. Each row carries the year the event happened and the sentence Wikipedia publishes for it, ordered from the oldest entry to the most recent.
Two selectors above the table switch the date: choose a month and a day, press the button, and the page loads that day’s list. No account is needed and the address of the page stays the same.
English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French lists come from the Wikimedia “On this day” feed for that language edition. The Japanese page reads the events section of the date article on ja.wikipedia.org, because the feed does not serve Japanese. VoriTools fetches the list, keeps a local copy for up to six hours and renders it; no entry is written by hand here.
Each language edition curates its own entries, so the lists differ: a day can hold a few rows in one language and dozens in another, and the French list is not a translation of the English one. The date shown is the date on the server (Asia/Shanghai), so visitors in other time zones may see the next or the previous day for a few hours.
Wikipedia’s selection is a starting point, not a citation. Dates before the Gregorian reform are usually given in the calendar that was in use at the time, and the same event can be filed under different years in different editions. A missing entry means the editors of that edition did not list it, not that nothing happened.
The wording is quoted, not rewritten: only markers such as “(in English)” that link to another language version are removed. Treat a row as a pointer to the article and check anything that matters against a primary source.
Wikipedia text is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, and the exact version differs per language edition. Reusing a sentence means keeping the attribution and a link to the article it came from; the source line under the table is the attribution this page provides.
The rest of the page — the selectors, the year column and the ordering — is VoriTools’ own work. The list is ordinary HTML rendered on the server, so it works with JavaScript disabled and can be saved or printed with the browser.