About DailyKnowledge

A daily picture quiz built from real archive photographs. Every file asks the same question: do you recognise what actually happened on this date?

What it is

Each day opens a new file of five photographs, all of events that genuinely happened on that calendar date, somewhere between antiquity and the recent past. You pick what each one shows from four options, then get the year and the story behind it.

Files rotate automatically at midnight New York time. Nothing is deleted - once a file is a day old it stays readable in the archive, with the full answer key and the explanation for every photograph.

Where the photographs come from

Every specimen is a real image from the historical record: a photograph, print, engraving or painting held in a public archive. Nothing here is generated. On the rare occasion a picture shows a museum reconstruction rather than the thing itself, the explanation says so plainly.

Most material is in the public domain, mostly from Wikimedia Commons and national archive collections. A small number of specimens are used under a Creative Commons licence and carry their photographer and licence as a credit line on the card itself. Images are cropped only for one reason: to remove a caption, date or place name printed on the image, which would otherwise give the answer away before the question is asked.

How facts are checked

• Every date and claim is verified against primary sources or established reference works before a specimen is filed.
• Every image is inspected individually. Archive files are routinely mislabelled - photographs have been rejected here for showing the wrong army, the wrong year, or a watermark that the licence description did not mention.
• The three wrong answers are written by hand for each question and always come from the same category as the right one. Guessing by feel should not work.
• Explanations state what is known. Where an account is disputed or a detail is uncertain, it is described as such rather than smoothed over.