Several months

Some feeds automatically remove past dates after a certain point, so the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that your feed is keeping the past events that you want to display.

Setting startdate is the correct way to keep past events in the feed, but since it’s a fixed date, you’ll run into a couple of problems: First, that date would always be the start of the calendar (unless you manually change it), and therefore would also be the date that displays by default when the page loads. Second, you’d need to set a really large limitdays value to keep future dates appearing (or, again, manually change it periodically).

I may look at adding a pastdays option that you could use instead of startdate, so that the calendar display would still load on the current date, but it would include a rolling number of days in the past as well. (For example, if you wanted to always show the previous 3 months you would set pastdays="90".)

Again this feature is not in the plugin right now, but I’m working on the plugin today so I’ll see if it’s something I could add without too much trouble.

As far as navigation with arrows goes, that is also something I’m considering.

I’m currently checking in version 5.2.0 of the plugin, which adds this pastdays feature. This should be available to download within the next hour.

Note that since limitdays calculates from the first date in the displayed range, not the current date, you may need to adjust it as well. (For example, the default value is 365, so while it currently displays future events for a year out from the current date, if you were to use pastdays="90", then the calendar would only show 9 months of future events.)