DailyKnowledge · Provenance
Every photograph on this site comes from Wikimedia Commons. Most are in the public domain. A smaller number are published by their authors under Creative Commons or open government licences, and those authors are named below with a link to the exact terms.
These require attribution. If you reuse one, credit the author and follow the linked licence rather than crediting this site.
A scholar announces that he can read Egyptian hieroglyphs
APK / CC BY 4.0
A fertiliser store explodes and leaves a crater the size of a lake
BASF / CC BY-SA 3.0
A novelist wins the Nobel Prize and dares not travel to collect it
Bert Verhoeff / Anefo / CC0
A monarch's coffin is carried through the capital to lie in state
ChiralJon / CC BY 2.0
A president protects a landmark by inventing a new kind of protection
DXR / CC BY-SA 4.0
A concert hall of white shells opens ten years late and fourteen times over budget
Diliff / CC BY-SA 3.0
Savers queue in the street in the first British bank run for 150 years
Dominic Alves / CC BY 2.0
Two armies attack across a canal and a plateau on the holiest day of the year
IDF Spokesperson's Unit / CC BY-SA 3.0
The astronomer who proved the universe is expanding dies at his desk
International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / CC BY 4.0
A grove of the largest living things on Earth is made a national park
Jim Bahn / CC BY 2.0
The first pocket radio built on transistors instead of valves goes on sale
Joe Haupt / CC BY-SA 2.0
A kidnapped heiress who joined her kidnappers is finally arrested
John Malmin / Los Angeles Times / CC BY 4.0
A conference picks one observatory to be the line all longitude is measured from
Julian Herzog / CC BY 4.0
A council opens that will let Catholics hear mass in their own language
Lothar Wolleh / CC BY-SA 3.0
Hikers find a 5,000 year old body melting out of a glacier
Mannivu / CC BY-SA 4.0
A new star appears in the sky and outshines every planet for three weeks
NASA / ESA / JHU / R. Sankrit and W. Blair
Nations agree to phase out the chemicals eating a hole in the ozone layer
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / CC BY 2.0
A comet hunter logs a faint spiral smudge to stop himself mistaking it for a comet
NASA and the European Space Agency
A king dies of dysentery in a civil war he started by breaking his own charter
Philip Halling / CC BY-SA 2.0
A former first lady marries a Greek shipping magnate and loses her halo
Pieter Jongerhuis / Anefo / CC BY-SA 3.0 NL
An empire declares war on its huge northern neighbour over a religious dispute
Roger Fenton
An opera set in a southern tenement courtyard opens on Broadway
Touring Club Italiano / CC BY-SA 4.0
A queen opens the first nuclear station to sell power to a national grid
UK government / Open Government Licence v3.0These 252 photographs are out of copyright or were released into the public domain. No permission is needed to reuse them, from us or from anyone else. Where an author is known, Wikimedia Commons records it on the original file page.
| Filed | Year | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Aug | 1883 | Krakatoa erupts with a blast heard 3,000 miles away |
| 27 Aug | 1896 | The shortest war ever recorded ends in 38 minutes |
| 27 Aug | 1991 | Pearl Jam release their debut album, Ten |
| 27 Aug | 2003 | Mars swings closer to Earth than it has in 60,000 years |
| 27 Aug | 2015 | Usain Bolt wins his fourth straight 200m world title |
| 28 Aug | 1963 | Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech |
| 28 Aug | 1859 | The most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded strikes Earth |
| 28 Aug | 1789 | William Herschel discovers Saturn's moon Enceladus |
| 28 Aug | 1945 | Branch Rickey tells Jackie Robinson he'll break baseball's color line |
| 28 Aug | 1833 | The Slavery Abolition Act receives royal assent in Britain |
| 29 Aug | 1958 | Michael Jackson is born |
| 29 Aug | 1831 | Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic induction |
| 29 Aug | 1885 | Daimler and Maybach ride the first motorcycle |
| 29 Aug | 1907 | The Quebec Bridge collapses during construction |
| 29 Aug | 1842 | The Treaty of Nanking ends the First Opium War |
| 30 Aug | 1967 | Thurgood Marshall is confirmed to the Supreme Court |
| 30 Aug | 1937 | Joe Louis defeats Tommy Farr in a 15-round decision |
| 30 Aug | 1914 | Germany crushes the Russian army at the Battle of Tannenberg |
| 30 Aug | 1983 | Guion Bluford becomes the first African American in space |
| 30 Aug | 1945 | General MacArthur lands in Japan to begin the occupation |
| 31 Aug | 1422 | Henry V dies, leaving a nine-month-old baby as King of England |
| 31 Aug | 1888 | Jack the Ripper claims the first of his canonical victims |
| 31 Aug | 1886 | Charleston is wrecked by the worst earthquake the eastern United States has recorded |
| 31 Aug | 1803 | Lewis sets off down the Ohio to begin the expedition west |
| 31 Aug | 1897 | Edison patents the movie camera |
| 1 Sep | 1923 | An earthquake and firestorm destroy Tokyo and Yokohama |
| 1 Sep | 1985 | The wreck of the Titanic is found on the ocean floor |
| 1 Sep | 1972 | Bobby Fischer becomes world chess champion, ending Soviet dominance |
| 1 Sep | 1870 | Napoleon III is captured at Sedan with his whole army |
| 1 Sep | 1914 | Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive, dies in Cincinnati Zoo |
| 2 Sep | 1945 | Japan signs the surrender that formally ends the Second World War |
| 2 Sep | 1666 | The Great Fire of London starts in a bakery on Pudding Lane |
| 2 Sep | 1864 | Sherman captures Atlanta, helping secure Lincoln a second term |
| 2 Sep | -31 | Octavian defeats Antony and Cleopatra at Actium |
| 2 Sep | 1789 | The US Treasury is created, and Alexander Hamilton takes charge of it |
| 3 Sep | 1783 | A treaty in Paris formally ends the American Revolutionary War |
| 3 Sep | 1658 | Oliver Cromwell dies, and the English republic dies with him |
| 3 Sep | 1967 | An entire country switches which side of the road it drives on |
| 3 Sep | 1976 | A lander touches down on Mars and starts sending back pictures |
| 3 Sep | 1928 | Fleming returns from holiday to find a mould has killed his bacteria |
| 4 Sep | 1886 | Geronimo surrenders, ending the last major Native American armed resistance |
| 4 Sep | 1972 | Mark Spitz wins a seventh gold medal at a single Olympics |
| 4 Sep | 1882 | The first commercial central power station starts supplying electricity |
| 4 Sep | 1957 | Nine Black students are blocked from entering an all-white high school |
| 4 Sep | 1888 | A patent is granted for the camera that put photography in ordinary hands |
| 5 Sep | 1977 | A probe launches that is still transmitting from interstellar space |
| 5 Sep | 1774 | Delegates from twelve colonies meet to organise resistance to Britain |
| 5 Sep | 1698 | A tsar returns from Europe and starts forcibly westernising his court |
| 5 Sep | 1882 | The first Labor Day parade fills the streets of New York |
| 5 Sep | 1905 | Theodore Roosevelt brokers peace between Russia and Japan |
| 6 Sep | 1901 | McKinley is shot at point blank range at a public reception |
| 6 Sep | 1522 | Elcano brings home the last ship of Magellan's fleet |
| 6 Sep | 1620 | The Mayflower finally sails for America |
| 6 Sep | 1492 | Columbus leaves the Canary Islands and sails west into open ocean |
| 6 Sep | 1781 | Benedict Arnold burns a town in his own home state |
| 7 Sep | 1940 | German bombers begin 57 consecutive nights of raids on a capital city |
| 7 Sep | 1533 | A future queen is born, to her father's open disappointment |
| 7 Sep | 1822 | A prince declares independence rather than return to Europe |
| 7 Sep | 1776 | Bushnell's Turtle makes the first submarine attack in history |
| 7 Sep | 1936 | The last known thylacine dies in a zoo enclosure |
| 8 Sep | 1941 | A siege begins that will last nearly 900 days |
| 8 Sep | 1974 | A new president pardons the one who resigned a month earlier |
| 8 Sep | 1943 | Italy switches sides in the middle of the war |
| 8 Sep | 1504 | Michelangelo's David is unveiled in the Piazza della Signoria |
| 8 Sep | 1900 | A hurricane wipes out Galveston, the deadliest disaster the country has known |
| 9 Sep | 1976 | The founder of the People's Republic of China dies |
| 9 Sep | 1543 | A nine month old baby is crowned queen of Scotland |
| 9 Sep | 1776 | Congress officially renames the colonies the United States |
| 9 Sep | 1791 | Commissioners name the new federal capital after the sitting president |
| 9 Sep | 1892 | Barnard spots Amalthea, the last moon found by eye alone |
| 10 Sep | 1846 | A patent is granted for the lockstitch sewing machine |
| 10 Sep | 1939 | Canada declares war on Germany, a week after Britain |
| 10 Sep | 1608 | John Smith takes charge of a starving colony |
| 10 Sep | 1813 | An American fleet captures an entire British squadron |
| 10 Sep | 1960 | An Ethiopian runner wins the Olympic marathon barefoot |
| 11 Sep | 1297 | A Scottish army destroys an English force at a river crossing |
| 11 Sep | 1893 | A young monk introduces Hinduism to America in a single speech |
| 11 Sep | 1609 | A Dutch ship enters the harbour of what will become New York |
| 11 Sep | 1922 | The League of Nations confirms British rule over Palestine |
| 11 Sep | 1541 | Santiago is attacked and burned months after Valdivia founds it |
| 12 Sep | 1940 | Four teenagers following a dog find prehistoric paintings underground |
| 12 Sep | 1962 | A president commits a nation to reaching the Moon within the decade |
| 12 Sep | 1683 | The largest cavalry charge in history breaks a siege |
| 12 Sep | 1953 | John Kennedy marries Jacqueline Bouvier at Newport |
| 12 Sep | 1974 | A military committee deposes an emperor after 44 years |
| 13 Sep | 1848 | A railway worker survives an iron bar passing through his head |
| 13 Sep | 1993 | A handshake on the White House lawn seals a peace framework |
| 13 Sep | 1759 | Wolfe and Montcalm both die on the Plains of Abraham |
| 13 Sep | 1916 | Roald Dahl, fighter pilot turned children's author, is born |
| 13 Sep | 1971 | A four day prison uprising ends in the bloodiest assault of its kind |
| 14 Sep | 1812 | An emperor enters a capital city and finds it burning |
| 14 Sep | 1814 | A lawyer watching a bombardment writes the words to a national anthem |
| 14 Sep | 1901 | The youngest person ever to hold the presidency is sworn in |
| 15 Sep | 1916 | Tanks are used in battle for the first time |
| 15 Sep | 1835 | A survey ship reaches the islands that will reshape biology |
| 15 Sep | 1978 | A boxer wins the heavyweight title for a third time |
| 15 Sep | 1981 | The first woman is confirmed to the United States Supreme Court |
| 15 Sep | 1830 | The first intercity passenger railway opens, and kills a member of parliament |
| 16 Sep | 1810 | A parish priest calls his congregation to revolt and starts a war of independence |
| 16 Sep | 1893 | A hundred thousand people race on horseback to claim free land |
| 16 Sep | 1920 | A cart packed with explosives kills dozens in a financial district |
| 16 Sep | 1974 | A president offers conditional amnesty to those who dodged the draft |
| 17 Sep | 1787 | Thirty-nine delegates sign a constitution that is still in force |
| 17 Sep | 1862 | The bloodiest single day in American history |
| 17 Sep | 1908 | A passenger becomes the first person killed in an aeroplane crash |
| 17 Sep | 1849 | A woman escapes slavery and returns, again and again, to free others |
| 17 Sep | 1978 | Two old enemies sign a peace framework after thirteen days at a country retreat |
| 18 Sep | 324 | An emperor defeats his last rival and rules Rome alone |
| 18 Sep | 1961 | The head of the United Nations dies in a plane crash on a peace mission |
| 18 Sep | 1970 | A guitarist dies in London at twenty-seven |
| 18 Sep | 1873 | A bank failure sets off a panic that shuts the stock exchange for ten days |
| 19 Sep | 1783 | A sheep, a duck and a rooster become the first air passengers |
| 19 Sep | 1881 | A president dies eleven weeks after being shot |
| 19 Sep | 1893 | A country becomes the first in the world to let women vote |
| 19 Sep | 1985 | An earthquake flattens the centre of a capital city |
| 20 Sep | 1519 | Five ships set out to sail all the way round the world |
| 20 Sep | 1870 | Artillery breaches an ancient city wall and ends the pope's rule over it |
| 20 Sep | 1911 | A warship rams the world's largest liner and tears open its hull |
| 20 Sep | 1962 | A governor personally blocks a student from enrolling at a university |
| 20 Sep | 1973 | A woman beats a former champion in a match watched by 90 million people |
| 21 Sep | 1942 | The most expensive weapon of the war makes its first flight |
| 21 Sep | 1938 | A hurricane arrives without warning and kills hundreds in New England |
| 21 Sep | 1904 | A chief who led his people on a 1,100 mile flight dies in exile |
| 21 Sep | 1780 | A celebrated general is exposed as a traitor and flees to the enemy |
| 22 Sep | 1914 | One submarine sinks three warships in a single hour |
| 22 Sep | 1927 | A knocked-down champion is saved by a referee who will not start counting |
| 22 Sep | 1961 | A president signs a law sending young volunteers to work abroad |
| 22 Sep | 1862 | A president warns that in a hundred days he will free the enemy's slaves |
| 22 Sep | 1791 | A bookbinder's apprentice is born who will work out how to generate electricity |
| 23 Sep | 1779 | A sinking captain is asked to surrender and refuses |
| 23 Sep | 1952 | A candidate saves his career on television by talking about his dog |
| 23 Sep | 1846 | A planet is found by mathematics before anyone looks for it |
| 23 Sep | 1938 | A metal cylinder is buried with instructions not to open it for 5,000 years |
| 23 Sep | 1913 | A pilot crosses the Mediterranean alone with barely any fuel to spare |
| 24 Sep | 1960 | The first nuclear powered aircraft carrier takes to the water |
| 24 Sep | 1929 | A pilot takes off, flies and lands without ever seeing outside |
| 24 Sep | 1852 | A steam engine is carried aloft and an aircraft is steered for the first time |
| 24 Sep | 1789 | A single act of Congress creates a country's entire court system |
| 25 Sep | 1962 | A heavyweight title changes hands in two minutes and six seconds |
| 25 Sep | 1513 | An explorer wades into an ocean no European had seen and claims all of it |
| 25 Sep | 1911 | A battleship blows up at anchor in its own harbour |
| 25 Sep | 1690 | A newspaper prints its first issue and is shut down four days later |
| 26 Sep | 1960 | Two candidates debate on television for the first time |
| 26 Sep | 1687 | A shell hits a powder store and blows the roof off a 2,000 year old temple |
| 26 Sep | 1580 | A privateer returns after three years, having gone round the world |
| 26 Sep | 1918 | The largest battle in American history begins |
| 26 Sep | 1905 | A patent clerk publishes a paper that rewrites space and time |
| 27 Sep | 1908 | A car goes on sale that an ordinary worker can afford |
| 27 Sep | 1941 | The first of a fleet of 2,700 emergency cargo ships is launched |
| 27 Sep | 1964 | A commission publishes its report on a president's assassination |
| 27 Sep | 1590 | A pope dies twelve days after his election, before he is even crowned |
| 28 Sep | 1066 | An invasion fleet lands unopposed on the English coast |
| 28 Sep | 1781 | An allied army digs in around a port and traps an army that cannot be evacuated |
| 28 Sep | 1889 | A metal cylinder in a vault becomes the definition of the kilogram |
| 28 Sep | 1924 | Two aircraft land after flying all the way round the world |
| 29 Sep | 1988 | A shuttle flies again, two and a half years after one exploded |
| 29 Sep | 1399 | A king signs away his own crown while a prisoner in the Tower |
| 29 Sep | 1913 | The inventor of an engine vanishes overboard on a night crossing |
| 29 Sep | 1916 | A share price rise makes someone the world's first billionaire |
| 29 Sep | 1902 | A novelist who took on his own government dies of fumes from a blocked chimney |
| 30 Sep | 1927 | A batter hits his sixtieth home run of the season |
| 30 Sep | 1935 | The tallest dam in the world is dedicated, two years ahead of schedule |
| 30 Sep | 1949 | The last flight lands, ending fifteen months of feeding a city by air |
| 30 Sep | 1938 | A prime minister comes home from a summit promising peace |
| 30 Sep | 1791 | An opera written for a suburban theatre opens, and its composer has weeks to live |
| 1 Oct | 1903 | Two rival leagues meet for a championship series for the first time |
| 1 Oct | 1890 | A valley of granite cliffs and waterfalls is made a national park |
| 1 Oct | 1946 | A tribunal reads out its verdicts on the leaders of a defeated regime |
| 1 Oct | 1949 | A leader stands on a city gate and declares a new republic founded |
| 1 Oct | 1918 | An officer in local dress enters a captured desert capital ahead of the main army |
| 2 Oct | 1187 | A sultan takes a holy city back after eighty-eight years of crusader rule |
| 2 Oct | 1925 | An inventor transmits the first moving image of a human face |
| 2 Oct | 1950 | A comic strip about a group of small children appears in seven newspapers |
| 2 Oct | 1959 | A weekly anthology of strange stories begins on television |
| 2 Oct | 1780 | A British officer is hanged as a spy after a general's treason is exposed |
| 3 Oct | 1955 | A daily children's variety show starts on television with a cast of child performers |
| 3 Oct | 1990 | Two countries divided for forty-one years become one again |
| 3 Oct | 1226 | A friar who gave away his inheritance dies in the hut he asked to be carried to |
| 3 Oct | 1863 | A president fixes a national day of thanksgiving in the middle of a civil war |
| 3 Oct | 1935 | An empire invades one of the last independent countries in Africa |
| 4 Oct | 1957 | A polished metal sphere becomes the first object put into orbit |
| 4 Oct | 1927 | Carving begins on four presidents' faces in a granite mountainside |
| 4 Oct | 1582 | A calendar reform ends the year with ten days that never happened |
| 4 Oct | 1777 | A dawn attack on an occupying army fails in thick fog and gunsmoke |
| 5 Oct | 1789 | Thousands of women march out of a capital to fetch the king back from his palace |
| 5 Oct | 1930 | An airship on its maiden voyage to India comes down on a French hillside |
| 5 Oct | 1936 | Two hundred unemployed shipyard men set off to walk to the capital |
| 5 Oct | 1877 | A chief surrenders forty miles from the border after a fighting retreat of 1,100 miles |
| 5 Oct | 1908 | A prince declares his country fully independent and takes the title of tsar |
| 6 Oct | 1889 | A dance hall with a fake windmill on the roof opens in a hillside district |
| 6 Oct | 1961 | A president tells families to build shelters against nuclear fallout |
| 6 Oct | 1981 | A president is shot dead by his own soldiers during a military parade |
| 6 Oct | 1892 | A poet laureate dies after forty-two years in the post |
| 7 Oct | 1571 | Two fleets of oared galleys meet in the last great battle fought under oars |
| 7 Oct | 1959 | A probe sends back the first pictures of the side of the Moon nobody had seen |
| 7 Oct | 1913 | A car factory starts moving the work past the men instead of the other way round |
| 7 Oct | 1777 | An invading army is broken in a second battle and surrenders ten days later |
| 7 Oct | 1849 | A writer dies days after being found delirious in another man's clothes |
| 8 Oct | 1871 | A fire in a barn spreads until it has burned out the centre of a great city |
| 8 Oct | 1871 | A forest fire wipes out a lumber town and kills more people than any fire since |
| 8 Oct | 1967 | A revolutionary is captured in a ravine after his guerrilla campaign collapses |
| 8 Oct | 1918 | A conscientious objector turned corporal captures 132 men almost single-handed |
| 9 Oct | 1934 | A king is shot in the back of an open car on a state visit to an ally |
| 9 Oct | 1919 | A championship series ends in a result eight of the losing players had sold |
| 9 Oct | 1936 | A dam in a desert canyon begins sending power to a city 260 miles away |
| 9 Oct | 1888 | A monument that stood half built for twenty-two years finally opens to the public |
| 10 Oct | 1913 | A president in another country presses a button and two oceans meet |
| 10 Oct | 1973 | A vice president resigns and pleads no contest to a tax charge the same afternoon |
| 10 Oct | 1911 | An army mutiny in a river city brings down a dynasty within months |
| 10 Oct | 1813 | A composer of twenty-six operas is born in a village inn |
| 11 Oct | 1968 | Three astronauts fly the first crewed mission of a programme aiming at the Moon |
| 11 Oct | 1986 | Two leaders nearly agree to abolish all their nuclear weapons, then walk away |
| 11 Oct | 1521 | A pope awards a king a grand title for a book attacking the reformers |
| 11 Oct | 1727 | A king is crowned to a new anthem that every coronation since has used |
| 12 Oct | 1492 | A crew that nearly mutinied a week earlier sights land at two in the morning |
| 12 Oct | 1933 | An army prison on an island is handed over to be a maximum security jail |
| 12 Oct | 1928 | A machine that breathes for a paralysed patient is used for the first time |
| 12 Oct | 1870 | A defeated general dies as a college president, five years after surrendering |
| 12 Oct | 1915 | A nurse is shot by a firing squad for helping soldiers escape an occupied country |
| 13 Oct | 1307 | A king has every member of a wealthy military order arrested in one dawn sweep |
| 13 Oct | 1860 | A photographer goes up in a tethered balloon and takes the first aerial picture in America |
| 13 Oct | 1775 | A congress votes to fit out two armed ships and founds a navy by accident |
| 14 Oct | 1066 | A king is killed and a duke wins a kingdom in a single day's fighting |
| 14 Oct | 1926 | A book of stories about a boy's stuffed bear is published |
| 14 Oct | 1947 | A pilot with two broken ribs flies faster than sound and tells almost nobody |
| 14 Oct | 1964 | A minister of 35 becomes the youngest person yet to win the Nobel Peace Prize |
| 14 Oct | 1912 | A candidate is shot on his way to a rally and gives the speech anyway |
| 15 Oct | 1815 | A defeated emperor arrives at the island where he will spend the rest of his life |
| 15 Oct | 1917 | An exotic dancer is shot as a double agent on thin evidence |
| 15 Oct | 1951 | A sitcom starts that will invent the rerun and be filmed in front of an audience |
| 15 Oct | 1966 | Two college students found a party that will patrol the police with law books and guns |
| 15 Oct | 1844 | A philosopher is born who will spend his last eleven years insane |
| 16 Oct | 1793 | A queen is driven through the streets in an open cart and beheaded |
| 16 Oct | 1968 | Two medallists raise gloved fists on the podium and are sent home |
| 16 Oct | 1846 | A dentist puts a patient to sleep with a vapour and surgery stops being torture |
| 16 Oct | 1978 | A Polish cardinal is elected pope, the first non-Italian in 455 years |
| 16 Oct | 1859 | An abolitionist seizes an arsenal hoping to arm a slave revolt |
| 17 Oct | 1973 | Oil producers cut output and quadruple the price within months |
| 17 Oct | 1931 | A gang boss the police could never touch is convicted of tax evasion |
| 17 Oct | 1907 | A wireless service opens that lets the public send messages across an ocean |
| 17 Oct | 1849 | A composer who wrote almost only for the piano dies at 39 |
| 18 Oct | 1851 | A novel about a captain hunting a white whale is published and flops |
| 18 Oct | 1931 | An inventor holding over a thousand patents dies at 84 |
| 18 Oct | 1867 | A territory the size of a subcontinent changes hands for two cents an acre |
| 18 Oct | 1898 | An island changes flags and its people spend a century arguing about status |
| 19 Oct | 1469 | Two cousins marry in secret and join two kingdoms into one country |
| 19 Oct | 1864 | A general gallops twenty miles to a battle his army is losing and turns it around |
| 19 Oct | 1943 | A soil bacterium yields the first drug that can cure tuberculosis |
| 19 Oct | 1745 | A satirist who proposed eating babies to fix poverty dies in Dublin |
| 20 Oct | 1944 | A general wades ashore to keep a promise he made two years earlier |
| 20 Oct | 1827 | Three fleets destroy a fourth in the last great battle fought under sail |
| 20 Oct | 1740 | A woman of 23 inherits a throne and half of Europe attacks her for it |