NEW YEAR’S EVE AND DAY
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.”
Flu pandemic: New Year’s Eve 1918 also took place during a pandemic. A brutal fall and winter wave had killed tens of thousands of Americans. By Dec. 31, some cities had loosened their public health measures, inviting a more joyous holiday. “Hotels and clubs and other places where revelers congregate to greet the new year are overdoing themselves in the way of entertainment,” The Chicago Daily News reported.
HOPE EVERYONE IS SAFE.
rob
