Tips for "Search the History Database"

The search engine for looking up dates is quite powerful if you know how to use it. As with any search engine if you are too specific it will return nothing. If you are too general it will return everything. Try adding a removing items from your search specification to get the right balance (see the first couple of examples).

The Hyperlinking Option

To get hyperlinking select the hyperlink option in the pulldown menu.

Examples By Input Fields and Results

Month	Day	Year	AD/BC	Must Contain:		Action
Feb	4	Any	ignored			Returns a list of events that happened on Feb 4
Feb	4	1981	ignored	United States		NO RESULTS Returns no results because it is too specific
Any	Any	Any	ignored	important events		NO RESULTS since there is no event that contains the string "important events"'
Any	Any	1990-2000	ignored			NO RESULTS since there is no year called "1990-2000". A year generally has 4 digits or less. This has 8 digits and a dash. You can pattern match a year however. See below.
Feb	4	Any	ignored	sporting events		NO RESULTS returns events that have the exact character string "sport events" in them. It does not match the catagory "sporting events".
Any	Any	Any	ignored	sports		Returns a list of events that that contain the substring "sports". It does not match the subject sports. If you want to know about football, baseball, or curling you might search for one of those substrings.
Mar	Any	Any	ignored	New Zealand		Find all events concerning New Zealand that happened in March
Oct	3	Any	ignored			Find all events occurring on October 3rd
Any	Any	1912	AD			Find all events occurring in the year 1912
Dec	31	Any	ignored	is born		Find all people born on Dec 31 (I use "is born" for births and "dies" for deaths)
Any	Any	Any	ignored	Oregon		Find all events containing the string Oregon
Any	Any	Any	ignored	disco\b		Find all events related to disco (the \b means word boundary so that you won't also match more popular words like dicovery and discovers.)
Any	Any	Any	ignored	henry v\b		Find all events related to Henry V but not Henry VI, Henry VII, Henry VIII
Any	Any	Any	ignored	\bbridge\b		Matches exactly the word bridge but not Loyd Bridges or Cambridge
Any	Any	11..	AD			The period means any character so this finds all events occurring in the 1100's
Oct	Any	19..	AD			Find all events that happened in October in the 1900's
Any	Any	18..	AD	Japan		Find all events containing the string "japan" that happened in the 1800's
Any	Any	..	BC			The two periods mean any two characters, in this case, any two digit year. The BC puts it in the 90 years from 99 BC to 10 BC.
Any	Any	Any	ignored	Japan.*fish		The period after Japan in content matches any character and the star says match zero or more of them. So this says find all events containing the word "Japan" followed by zero or more of any chacter followed by the word "fish".
Any	Any	Any	ignored	becomes the \d+.. state		Looks for when states entered the United States. Actually matches the string "becomes the " followed by one or more digits followed by any two characters to absorb the ordinal suffix followed by the string " state"

How Things DO NOT Work

• You can't search by a category such as "famous people" or "baseball" or "people who can speak 13 languages". The queries are made by a string match. See the next point.
• The content portion of the search is a string match. The pattern in the content must appear in the event entry. It is not a category match. So for example baseball will match:

  Jul 16 1889, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, baseball player known for barefooted playing, is born

  because "baseball" was in the entry, but you won't get:

  Oct 13 1903, The first world series game is played

  which didn't contain the word "baseball".

• Don't over specify the content portion of the pattern. Suffixes are notorious. For example don't look up drowning which gets no hits. Look up drown which gets a dozen hits catching words like drown, drowned, drowns.
• If you specify an exact month, day and year the odds are slim it will match a date unless you know for sure something happened that day. For days in the 1900's there is only about a 1 in 8 chance of getting a hit at all. The more recent the date the higher the chances.
• you can not specify a range of years such as 1991-2001.
• Don't specify full names. I may not have the whole name in the entry. I may or may not choose the same titles. I may or may not have used the middle initial. I may not even be consistent in the way I label a person.
• Don't overspecify the date if you don't know that something of world significance happened on that date. The database contains over 10000 entries however, it covers a range of over 1 million days of history. The odds that something happened on your exact birthday is small (unless you are famous). If, for instance, you are interested in things that went on around the time of your birth, use the window on history feature. You might also try just the month and day of your birth.

How Things DO Work

• "Any" in the Mon, Day or Year fields means any month, day, or year.
• "Any" matches the string "Any" when in the content field. The content field should be blank for matching any content
• The Year box is a text box. You can put in a perl pattern here. More about perl patterns later.
• The AD/BC box is ignored if "Any" appears in the Year box.
• The content field does NOT match concepts. It matches strings of letters only.
• The content box allows you to type in a string to match the event description or even a subset of perl patterns for the event. For example, if you want to find only those events in March that concern New Zealand. Then you put New Zealand into the content box and Mar in the Mon box.
• All content searches are case independent.
• When specifying a pattern in content you may not want to be too specific. For example, the person you are trying to match may have a middle name in the database. If you don't get a match try several different patterns. the
• Not all perl patterns are supported.
• Events are returned from earliest to latest.
• Only the last 60 matches will be returned. This may mean that earlier dates in the list will be cut off.

Tips for "Quick Searches"

• Quick Searches are relative to the current date not the date last searched for.
• "This Year" may not display the earliest dates in the year since it is subject to the 60 entry limit. Use other search mechanisms to get those dates such as searching by month and year.

Tips for "Search for Window Around Date"

• This displays the ten nearest events before the given date, all the events on the given date (in bold type), followed by the ten nearest events after the given date.
• The year must be an integer.

Examples

Search the History Database:

Quick Searches

Search for Window Around Date: