New Year's Day in America, Colonial Period to Today

3 units

This January intersession course explores the fascinating, freighted social and cultural history of New Year's Day in America from colonial times to the present. Topics include the history of New Year's Day traditions, such as mummery, drinking, visitations, and religious observances as well as the broader history of how Americans across time have perceived and marked the day. New Year's Day in St. Louis, from the mid-19th century onward, is closely considered. Specific U.S. New Year's histories explored include New Year's 1800, as Americans learned of the death, days before, of George Washington; the politically charged presentation on New Year's Day 1802 of a 1,200-pound Mammoth Cheese to President Jefferson; President Lincoln's New Year's Day 1863 Emancipation Proclamation; the association, by 1900, of new technology with new years and centuries; the first Times Square New Year's ball drop in 1908; the Cold War tradition of offering friendly greetings on the U.S.-Soviet telecommunications hotline on New Year's Day, plus U.S./U.S.S.R. leaders' 1987 televised New Year's addresses to the peoples of their opposite's nations; and the year 2000's Y2K scare and foiled millennium terror plot. The course will also consider this coming New Year's Day and a world besieged by the novel coronavirus, meme-makers, and other social media denizens preparing to count down to the new year.