How to cope with past centuries date ?

That won’t help. Any date before Jan 1 1970 could be problematic and may not display correctly. I think you need to leave the post date alone but use a custom field to enter your historical date. Then you could edit your theme’s templates to use this custom date in place of the post date.

Yes but the problem is sorting the post by date then.

yea, I think you can edit the database to change the date..

You can sort posts by meta value, so using a custom field would be a solution as esmi stated.

Backdated pre-1st January 1970 post displayed as published on the current viewing day
https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/10332

Bug with backdated post before 1 January 1970 – wp2.8
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/285531?replies=15