This paper presents an overview of the first edition of HIPE (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities), a pioneering shared task dedicated to the evaluation of named entity processing on historical newspapers in French, German and English. Since its introduction some twenty years ago, named entity (NE) processing has become an essential component of virtually any text mining application and has undergone major changes. Recently, two main trends characterise its developments: the adoption of deep learning architectures and the consideration of textual material originating from historical and cultural heritage collections. While the former opens up new opportunities, the latter introduces new challenges with heterogeneous, historical and noisy inputs. In this context, the objective of HIPE, run as part of the CLEF 2020 conference, is threefold: strengthening the robustness of existing approaches on non-standard inputs, enabling performance comparison of NE processing on historical texts, and, in the long run, fostering efficient semantic indexing of historical documents. Tasks, corpora, and results of 13 participating teams are presented.