Abstract
The division of history into definite eras, ages, or periods is always arbitrary. So involved is the sequence of human events, so continuous the drama of man's existence upon this planet, that it is impossible to determine at precisely what point the curtain has fallen upon one act of that drama and risen upon another. Yet the historian, endowed with the wisdom of retrospect, can point to certain dates in the chronicles of each century and say: this was a year of transition, a year of decision, a year of particular significance for the future. So must the historian of our own sordid times regard the year 1917; and so, perhaps, shall he regard the year 1945. In the former year, which witnessed the conversion of the first world war into "a conflict preeminently revolutionary in character," the old familiar world of our grandsires received its deathblow, and subsequent events necessarily initiated a new chapter in the annals of mankind. In the latter year, when mortar and machine gun had been silenced along the last lines of resistance in the second global war, and when the leadership of world affairs had passed from Great Britain, France and Germany to the United States and the Soviet Union, few could doubt that they stood at yet another turning point, and that the epoch begun twenty-eight years earlier had terminated.