Well, it's 2017 and everyone has been talking about the 500th anniversary year that we find ourselves here in 2017,

celebrating, of course, 1517 and the event of Luther nailing the 95 theses in the

beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. But I thought we could talk about another

anniversary year. Let's talk about the hundredth anniversary. Let's go back another anniversary

let's go back to 1917

see what was happening there and what are the consequences of that year?

Well, it was a year, of course, in which the world was at war.

It had been at war since 1914.

America had not yet entered the war as the new year 1917 came around.

Woodrow Wilson was elected president for a second time,

and in March of 1917 he delivered his second inaugural address.

In that address he said, we are provincials no longer.

The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just

passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we would have it so or not.

That was in March of 1917. A month later, April 1917, America entered World War I.

1917 was also the year of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Russian word Bolshevik means majority. It stood for the Russian Social Democratic

Party. It would come to be renamed the Communist Party. And in 1917, the Bolsheviks, led

by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew Zar Nicholas II.

Through the course of World War I, 11 million Russian peasants were sent into war and that more than anything fueled the Bolsheviks

to overthrow Tsar Nicholas II in the Bolshevik revolution.

We know the implications of both of those events for culture in the 20th century,

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