Today, we’re looking back. We focused on past New Year’s events that resonated in this unusual year.
The Times’s first New Year’s: The newspaper, founded in September 1851, covered its first New Year’s Eve less than four months later. It advertised religious ceremonies “appropriate to the close of the year” and stores selling New Year’s presents. On Jan. 1, the paper listed the past year’s notable deaths and “principal events,” including a gale that struck Massachusetts, a world’s fair in London and a coup in France.
The Civil War: On Dec. 30, 1862, Union troops near Murfreesboro, Tenn., played “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” Their Confederate foes answered with “Dixie,” and the two sides ended the night playing “Home, Sweet Home” together. The battle that followed, fought between New Year’s Eve and Jan. 2, 1863, was among the war’s deadliest.
Also on New Year’s Eve 1862, abolitionists held vigils as they waited for President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He did so the next day, freeing enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union. The vigils became the origin of the New Year’s Eve services that some African American churches still hold.
World War I: America entered World War I in 1917, and Times Square on New Year’s Eve that year was “thoroughly sedate and solemn,” The Times reported. Soldiers and sailors, forbidden to drink, sat in restaurants and hotels. Sugar was rationed, and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria was meatless. Broadway, “ankle-deep in confetti” a year before, was “gloomy, deserted and silent.”