New Years

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• SOURCE: Time
  1/8/20
  

  Trying to Get in Shape in 2020? Here's the History Behind the Common New Year's Resolution

  While New Year’s resolutions in general are thought to date back to the ancient Babylonians, the New Year’s resolution to get in shape is part of a much more recent trend.

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• SOURCE: Time
  12/27/19
  

  The Slaves Dread New Year's Day the Worst': The Grim History of January 1

  In the African-American community, New Year’s Day used to be widely known as “Hiring Day” — or “Heartbreak Day,” as the African-American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Nell described it — because enslaved people spent New Year’s Eve waiting, wondering if their owners were going to rent them out to someone else, thus potentially splitting up their families. 

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• SOURCE: BBC History Extra
  12/30/19
  

  Sobriety, royal presents and Victorian-era musings on failure: an unexpected history of New Year

  Today, we associate New Year’s Eve with raucous and optimistic parties, followed the next day by hungover resolutions to change our ways in the months ahead. But New Year celebrations haven’t always been so.