Some places used Christmas, which was the winter solstice on the Julian calendar. Some used the floating date of Easter, some went back to the old Roman March 1st, and some, if you remember back to the episode on why Christmas is on December 25, used the important date of March 25 as the start of the new year.
Eventually, for a whole host of reasons, Pope Gregory XIII fixed the problems with the Julian calendar and used the opportunity to standardize the new year back to being January 1. For good measure, they also made January 1 a holy day, which it still is today.
Originally January 1 was the feast of the circumcision of Jesus, but now it is just called the Solemnity of Mary. Of course, not everyone was on board with the new calendar. Catholic countries were quick to adopt, but protestant and orthodox countries were not.
In particular, one country was very late to adopt January 1 as the beginning of the New Year. England celebrated their new year on March In fact, their colonies in the Americas did this as well up until The very first thing mentioned in the act was the problem with using March 25 as the new year, when almost everyone else in Europe used January 1, including Scotland.
So, when England finally adopted January 1st as the start of the new year, so did the American colonies for the first time. Today, most countries now use the Gregorian Calendar, even if it is only for business purposes to stay in sync with the rest of the world. The fact remains that there is nothing astronomically significant about January 1, even though it is celebrating an astronomical event, aka a revolution around the sun. There are two types of solar years, and they are very similar.
A tropical year is a time from one season to the next based on when the solstices occur. The current years, based on the Gregorian Calendars, are tropical years.
However, there is also a thing known as a sidereal year, which is when we measure the position of the Earth based on the location of stars. The difference between a sidereal year and a tropical year is very small. A sidereal year is only 20 minutes longer. This can add up, however. The difference between the Julian Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar is only 11 minutes per year, and that caused a lot of problems over the centuries. There are two logical places to define a new year based on astronomic principles.
The first would be one of the solstices. This is something that humans have measured for thousands of years and have recognized its importance. The solstice really has more to do with the title of the Earth, however, not the orbit of the Earth.
There is something significant about the orbit of the Earth that is a point we could use, and oddly enough, it is really close to January 1, even though the ancients had no clue about it. But the prison with which Johnny Cash was most closely Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published. The gentle, The incident inspires the cautionary novel and subsequent movie Looking For Mr. President Franklin D. An American soldier accepts the surrender of about 20 Japanese soldiers who only discovered that the war was over by reading it in the newspaper.
On the island of Corregidor, located at the mouth of Manila Bay, a lone soldier on detail for the American Graves Registration was Amid celebration and chaos in the Cuban capitol of Havana, the U.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. US Government. Latin America. Quadrantids Meteors : The first major meteor shower of the year, the Quadrantids, peaks on the night of January 3 and in the early morning hours of January 4. Unlike other meteor showers, the peak period of the Quadrantids only lasts a few hours. Currently, the date is always roughly two weeks after the December solstice. See all events in the Cosmic Calendar. Rio de Janeiro is named after the month of January.
The president of the United States takes his oath of office on January 20th. Inauguration Day was initially held on March 4. This gave the president-elect enough time to select a cabinet and travel to Washington, D. With technological advances in vote counting, communication, and travel, the long gap between voting and the assumption of office was eventually cut short: On January 23, , the 20th Amendment to the US Constitution moved Inauguration Day to January 20th.
According to tradition, the birthstone for January is the garnet , representing constancy. Its birth flowers are the cottage pink Dianthus caryophyllus and the snowdrop Galanthus nivalis. Topics: Calendar , January , History , Months.
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