title: How can I work with dates before 1900 in PHP?
body: <p>I am using PHP and jQuery to build an interactive timeline which needs to display dates between 1500 and 2020. I usually use PHP's <code>strtotime</code> function when working with dates, but it does not work for dates pre-1900.</p>
  
  <p>The dates will come from a MySQL database, and are formatted as strings such as "<code>January 31, 1654</code>" (this may not be the ideal format, but I can't change how they are stored). I am using PHP to parse the dates, basically converting them into pixel values which determine where they are displayed on the timeline.</p>
  
  <p>What is the easiest way to parse these historical dates?</p>