Are there public APIs with historical fact databases?

Question

The most common source of free historical information is Wikipedia, but I lack an API that could be used, for example, request everything that happened on January 23, 2010. Some iPhone apps have databases (www.historysurferapp.com comes to mind, but also a ton of “what happened today”), but they seem home based and / or Wikipedia-based.

Does anyone know if such a “timeline of everything” database exists anywhere?

Answer 1

The closest thing is Wikipedia. Answer: No.

EDIT: These are some of the ones I have found since I asked this question:

http://thebigdb.com/ http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page 

EDIT2: http://gdeltproject.org/ - Global Event Database