A question for the world history SOL test: When was The Year of Confusion?
(A) 46 B.C.; (B) 1999; (C) 2000.
The answer, as savvy readers and Standards of Learning savants know, is all of the above.
Generally, this column avoids addressing subjects already exhausted by the columnists, critics and commentators on newspapers, radio, television and,lately, the Internet.
Wayne and Vivian Kendrick of Palmyra and The Times-Dispatch have forced me to tread where others have trod before. The worn path leads to the beginning of the 21st century.
An e-mail from the Kendricks last week fussed at the T-D “and all other parties that persist in referring to January 1, 2000, as the commencement of the millennium and the 21st century. The 20th century ends December 31, 2000 …. The 21st century (and the new millennium) commences January 1, 2001.”
The Kendricks are correct, of course. This newspaper and most of the “other parties” also understand that much of the world adheres to a calendar that marks the beginning of the first century as A.D. 1, not A.D. 0, and the beginning of the second century, 100 years later, as 101.
Thus both the next century and the “new millennium” begin Jan. 1, 2001.
Columns, articles, editorials and letters to the editor in The Times-Dispatch repeatedly have explained how the century turnover works. Former science writer Beverly Orndorff, now retired, wrote a column in 1996 acknowledging the national confusion.
Orndorff turned to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Nautical Almanac Office for support that “Jan. 1, 2001, is the official beginning of the next century.”
The Kendricks also are correct that the T-D and other media are fogging up what should be a clear matter of fact.
The Times-Dispatch weekly series, “Over Time,” carefully avoids using the word “century.” Instead, an editor’s note calls the series an exploration of “how life has changed over the past 100 years.” Readers easily may infer, though, that they are presented with a centennial feature a year early.
In April, readers of the T-D and 18 other Media General Inc. newspapers in Virginia were invited to vote on the greatest or most significant this or that of the century. The results will be published in a special section at the end of this year, not next year on the eve of the 21st century. The Virginia Historical Society is a participant in the project.
(“We’re just doing what everybody else is doing,” said Charles F. Bryan Jr., director of the historical society when asked why the early promotion of the turn of the century. He pointed out decade changes are viewed similarly, with reflections on, say, the 1990s in 1989, not in December 1990.)
On July 11, this newspaper published a special section, titled “A Century of Change: Sports in Virginia, 1900-1999.”
Newspaper headlines and articles, and radio and television commercials and personalities have linked the “new millennium” and 2000.
So why is all this happening early?
Part of the answer lies in the contemporary interlocking nature of the media: What one member does, others imitate so not to be left behind. Part may lie in the public’s fascination with the upcoming calendar turnover to “000.” Part may lie in the fear that computers will shut down the world if the programs decide 2000 really is 1900, when man couldn’t fly or buy stocks online.
Much may have to do with the money to be reaped from advertising and from huge celebrations and parties planned for New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the Gregorian calendar world leaves its teens.
All this grew into a popular tsunami that overwhelmed the calendar accountants and caused many editors to surrender and go with the flow.
Thus it is no wonder people in 1999 and 2000 will be as confused as were the Romans in 46 B.C. when Julius Caesar rearranged the calendar. To get the months and seasons aligned, he decreed that year would have 445 days, unlike subsequent years of 365 days; and 46 B.C. became known as The Year of Confusion.
For those who would point out Caesar didn’t know it was 46 B.C., please don’t add to the confusion.
Richmond newspaper editors at the beginning of the 20th century didn’t equivocate. Both The Richmond Dispatch and The Evening Leader wished their readers “Happy New Year” on Jan. 1, 1900, and took note of the beginning of the new century on Jan. 1, 1901.
The Dispatch topped Page One on Jan. 1, 1901, with a hand-lettered banner that read “Happy New Year, New Century.”
Richmond in 1899 and 1900 didn’t have the distractions of computers, the Internet, radio or television. The city of 85,000 was just getting acquainted with the telephone and the electric light bulb. A New Year’s Day headline in 1900 proclaimed, “The City Stands Now in the Full Light of the Electrical Sunrise.”
The big news was that a double line of piers had been erected along the James River to carry the tracks of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and that work was under way to capture “the water power of the James River for the manufacture of electricity.”
Newspapers then may not have been confused about the century turnover, but apparently some Richmond folks were. An editorial published in the Dispatch on Dec. 31, 1899, advised readers:
“One year more and the nineteenth century will have vanished and the twentieth appeared. There are some people who cannot understand how that will be … and we cannot pause to enlighten them now, but we beg them to accept the conclusions the experts have reached and save themselves further trouble in the premises.”
The advice then was for the readers to go with the flow. Today’s editors opted to do the same.
So what do we do on Dec. 31, 2000?
Have another party.
