Until 1933 presidents of the United States were inaugurated on March 4th. It was felt that that date, chosen advisedly by the architects of the Constitution, allowed a decent interval to elapse between the autumn elections and the assumption of power by the successful candidate.
The new president, after all, had to make arrangements for leaving home, to travel to the capital using the rather primitive means of transport available at the time, and to assemble his White House staff. The journey from the more extreme regions of the young nation might take up to three weeks of overland travel.
By 1932, however, the tempo of national life had increased dramatically. In that year what was to become the 29th Amendment to the Constitution was introduced to Congress. It changed Inauguration Day to January 20th.
Something similar happened long ago in ancient Rome, which had profound implications for us all.
In the early days of the Roman republic, the new year began in March on the day when the new consuls took office. In 153 BC, however, this transfer of power was rescheduled to January, and the first day of that month became New Year's Day, an arrangement which survived the Julian reformation of the calendar in 46BC and became the standard for most of southern Europe.
Implementation of the change, however, was slow enough elsewhere. In France, for example, New Year's Day continued to be today, March 1st, until AD800; then for nearly two centuries it was March 25th; and from AD996 to 1051 it coincided with Easter before finally reverting to January 1st.
Before the Norman conquest of England, the new year in these parts began on Christmas Day. In 1066 the Normans brought with them their new habit of beginning the year on January 1st, but this continental affectation lasted for barely a century: from 1155 onwards New Year's Day was Lady Day, March 25th, and so it remained for most fiscal and legal purposes until 1751.
For several centuries, therefore, inhabitants of England and Ireland had to contend with the awkward fact that nearly everybody else in Europe began their year in January. This led to the curious custom of giving a double-year date for the 12 overlapping weeks: Samuel Pepys, for example, might well have described his date of birth as February 23rd, 1632/3.
Lord Chesterfield's Act of 1751, however, regularised the calendar, and inter alia settled once and for all the vexed question of when the year begins; it decreed that the day after December 31st, 1751, should be January 1st, 1752, and so on in perpetuity.