Fun with Python: Today in History

Hey everyone,

Happy Saturday! I haven't done a "Fun with Python" post in a little while, so I wanted to share a small, fun project I put together: a script that shows you what happened on this day in history, right in your terminal.

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Fun with Python: Today in History

The idea was to create a simple script that fetches historical events for the current date and displays them in a clean, readable format. It's a fun little project that involves interacting with a web API, parsing JSON, and presenting data—all common and useful Python tasks.

The Script

The script uses the requests library to fetch data from the "On This Day" public API and the rich library to make the terminal output look great. As with all my tools, it's set up to be run easily with uv run, so you don't have to worry about managing a virtual environment manually.

It grabs the current date, then makes separate API calls to get the top five historical events, births, and deaths for that day.

The Result

After a few tweaks, the final output is a nicely formatted summary that's easy to read at a glance.

It’s a simple but satisfying project, and a great example of how you can use Python to pull interesting information from the web and create your own custom command-line tools.

You can find the complete, updated script in the Gist below if you'd like to try it out yourself.

• GitHub Gist: https://gist.github.com/TheCrazyGM/1c855cef0901f9c6a98a2d07ca9fe541

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM