1917
Bolsheviks seize Petrograd
Lenin's Red Guards took bridges, telegraph offices, and finally the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was arrested over supper. The cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot across the Neva. Within days a Bolshevik government decreed peace and the nationalization of land. A vast experiment in revolutionary socialism, one that would reshape the entire century, had begun.
America enters the war
Wilson, who had been reelected on keeping the country out, asked Congress to declare war on Germany after the Zimmermann telegram and unrestricted submarine warfare. The United States had almost no army. Within eighteen months it had two million men in France and an industry that would decide the outcome.
Balfour Declaration promises Jewish homeland
In a letter to Lord Rothschild, the British foreign secretary declared that His Majesty's Government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. One hundred and seventeen words. They would help shape the Middle East for a century and are still being argued over.
February Revolution topples the Tsar
Bread riots in Petrograd became mutiny, mutiny became revolution. Nicholas II, off at the front, tried to take a train home and found his own generals refusing him. He abdicated in a railway siding. The Romanov dynasty, after three hundred and four years, ended with a signed piece of paper handed through a carriage window.
First American troops land in France
Two hundred thousand doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing began disembarking at Saint-Nazaire. An aide, visiting Lafayette's grave, announced: Lafayette, we are here. The men were green and would not fight in large numbers until the spring of 1918, but their arrival told Germans the war was over.
Lawrence's Arabs take Aqaba
Riding across a waterless desert from the east, T. E. Lawrence and his Arab irregulars captured the Ottoman port of Aqaba from the landward side, where the Turks expected no attack. The British officer in his flowing robes was becoming a legend. The Arab Revolt was taking territory; the postwar betrayal at Versailles was still to come.
Silent Sentinels at the White House
Suffragists led by Alice Paul began picketing the White House gates six days a week, the first group ever to do so, holding banners that quoted Wilson's own words about democracy. Arrested, they staged hunger strikes and were force-fed in jail. Their persistence and suffering helped push Wilson and Congress toward the Nineteenth Amendment three years later.