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Calendars

The Calendar

An information leaflet from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, this page details the history of the calendar as a method for keeping track of the passage of time.

CalendarLand

Offering a list of links to other calendar pages, CalendarLand is a comprehensive resource of general, event, celestial, interactive, and cultural and religious calendars. The site also offers links to calendar indexes and directories, calendar information and resources, and calendar software.

Calendars and Their History

This site reprints an essay by L. E. Doggett about the history of various calendars, including the Gregorian, the Julian, the Hebrew, the Islamic, the Indian, and the Chinese. Additionally, the essay explains the astronomical bases of calendars, calendar reform movements, and historical eras and chronologies. This site is an important first step for anyone trying to understand where calendars originate and how they are created.

Chinese Astrology Calendar

By using this simple interface, you can click any year in the Twentieth Century and be given a chart that tells you, for example, that 1996 is the Year of the Rat and that 1997 will be the Year of the Ox. The backgrounds at this site are beautiful, but might be slow to download.

Compact Calendar

This site will generate a calendar, in the year of your choosing, which you can then print onto a single piece of paper.

Conversion Between Chinese and Gregorian Calendar

Enter either a Gregorian or a Chinese date and this forms-based site will convert your date into the other.

Ecclesiastical Calendar

The Ecclesiastical Calendar site offers Christian calendars for any year you specify. The calendar calculates when Easter and its attendant Christian holidays (Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and others) will fall in a particular year and also when other feast days in the Roman Catholic tradition will occur. The Web author explains the various algorithms used to calculate Easter's date, discusses when certain cultures adopted the Western method for determining the Easter date, and even posits that current formulas for determining the Easter date might not be valid in the far future.

Gregorian-Hijri Dates Converter

Converts Gregorian dates into the Islamic calendar.

The Hebrew Date for Today

This site translates today's Gregorian date into the Hebrew calendar (for example, 20 April 1996 is 1 Ayar 5756) and offers a list of upcoming holidays.

Heichal Shlomo Interactive Calendar

This frames-based calendar from Virtual Jerusalem offers the Hebrew calendar. Clicking a hyperlinked date brings up information about events and religious observations on that date and even "translates" the Hebrew date into the Gregorian (or Western) calendar.

Home Page for Calendar Reform

This site details several attempts that have been made to reform the Gregorian calendar. Included here are the World Calendar, the 13-month calendar, and the Positivist Calendar, in addition to a history of calendar reform.

J World

Billing itself as a "comprehensive calendar of birthdays, holidays, historical events, and fun dates", J World's interface allows you to look up a date, either within the current week or one of your choosing, and find a list of celebrities and historical figures born on that day plus holidays and historical events that occur on that date.

Leap Years

This page, from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Great Britain, reprints an Information Leaflet the Observatory published explaining the astronomical reasons that leap years exist.

Literary Hyper Calendar

Offering a "this day in literary history" service, the Literary Hyper Calendar has an interface consisting of the calendar for the current month. The calendar is a clickable imagemap and you simply click the date in which you are interested. In addition, you can choose from a list of other months and days.

Olivian Calendar

Another 13-month calendar proposal, this one lightly humorous. Common to all 13-month calendar propositions are 13 months of four weeks and 28 days. In this way, January 1 falls on the same weekday, year after year, unlike the current calendar, in which January 1 falls on a different day from one year to the next.

One-World Global Calendar

Offering festivals, celebrations, and holidays from ancient and modern cultures around the world, this is an excellent multicultural resource. The calendar is updated weekly.

Ron Smith Oldies Calendar

This calendar offers a this-week-in-rock-and-roll-history service, which details the anniversaries of births, deaths, and famous events occurring in that week.

Steffen Thorsen's Calendar Page

This page displays a calendar for the current year and offers, in addition, calendars for any year that you specify. You can look up the day of the week on which you were born or find out which weekday will begin the new millenium (Monday, January 1, 2001).