My client wants to add events dating back through their entire history (about 80 years). As a result, they want links in the sidebar to be able to display events by year.
Definitely possible, but not something the plugin facilitates directly.
What you’d probably want to do here is a custom query, set your start date to an appropriate date (1 Jan 1934 for instance) and then format the results appropriately. It’s a little beyond what we can guide you through, but we’ve got lots of resources that should give you an idea of how to approach this.