† 'This Day in Geographic History' presented by National Geographic

[Erik_Kowal]

The National Geographic website has an area that allows you to look up any day of the year** and be presented with a short article about a historical (and sometimes historic) event that took place on that day.

From the perspective of a learner of English, a very useful feature of this page is that if you click on the tab located to the right of the tab for the article, you will be taken to a list of explanations for its most important terms. This list is presented alongside separate additional columns that briefly describe 1) the part of speech, 2) the definition or explanation of the term, and 3) for some of the terms, links to encyclopedia entries which point to National Geographic's own multimedia encyclopedia. (Here, for example, is National Geographic's encyclopedia entry that explains what a desert is.)

For convenience, the terms selected from the article can be set to be displayed either alphabetically or in the order in which they occur in the text, and they can also be listed in groups that correspond to their part of speech.

Finally, the page also contains a box with links to interesting activities, multimedia, and reference resources. Each link is marked with an indication of the grade level it is suitable for.

** Clicking on this link will automatically take you to a page that shows an entry for the date on which you click the link. From there, an on-screen calendar allows you to select any day of the year.