It's unclear what you are asking because the title mentions cloning and the message text apparently talks about inspecting local
history.
So, assuming you're talking about inspecting local history I invite you to read the "gitrevisions" manual page (run git help revisions
) which describes multiple ways to list commits by the dates they were made.
In short, you use git log
or its lower-level cousin git rev-list
and pass it something like master@{2016-050-18 14:11:00} or use their command-line options "--since" and "--until" to specify a range of timestamps.
Note that accessing commits by date is imprecise by its nature and, while useful sometimes, might indicate you're trying to do something wrong way.