1968 was a momentous year. Maybe you are old enough to remember it. If not, there is always Mr. Google to tell you all about it.

It was the year I graduated from high school in Aurora, Colorado, in June. It was the year my family packed up and moved to Minnesota, also in June.

It was the year I started college at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato in August.

It was the year I turned 18 in November, and thus became old enough to vote and started to care about presidential elections.

But, enough about me.

1968 was also one of the most divisive, astounding, scary, and at times, horrific years in recent history. Maybe you don’t really believe that one year could be that important.

But, check out a large coffee-table style book called “1968 – The year that changed the country.” Or a four-part TV series by CNN that is simply called “1968.” It first aired a couple of years ago, and just recently was shown again on CNN, all four one-hour segments shown in a row.

It is a powerful, insightful program, with Tom Hanks as one of the producers. And yes, it was the thing that sparked me to write this week’s column.

Various news agencies have called 1968 the most “turbulent, traumatic, tumultuous and consequential year of the 20th century.”

If you are old enough to have lived through it, you know what all that means. Especially if you were a young person, 17 and 18 years old in 1968 like I was.

The war in Vietnam was the main point. It was America’s most unpopular war, and the one that the U.S. would eventually lose. In 1968 it had already been underway for years when came the Battle of Khe Sahn, the Massacre at Hue, and the Tet Offensive. I won’t go into detail about those battles, but you can certainly look them up.

Despite having 549,000 troops in Vietnam (and more in neighboring countries), the U.S. was starting to lose this war in 1968. And as many as 500 or more U.S. young men died in one week and nearly 2,500 were wounded.

And all of it was covered extensively by TV news. Walter Cronkite went there to cover the war and he was visibly shaken when he gave his reports.

There were a lot protests, especially by younger people my age. While those protests basically started in 1968 they would continue into the early 1970s. Students and others protesting the U.S. involvement (or lack of support) in Ukraine and Israel continues to this day.

The war in Vietnam would finally come to an end on April 30, 1975.

But, let us go back to 1968.

In March anti-war DFL presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy came within 230 votes of defeating then president Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in the New Hampshire primary. Later that month LBJ shockingly declared he would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination. Sound familiar? Think Joe Biden in 2024.

The vice president then started running for president, a Minnesotan named Hubert Humphrey. Then a young senator named Robert F. Kennedy also started running for president.

Kennedy won the California primary and then was assassinated in June, by a man named Sirhan Sirhan. It shocked the country, especially since his brother, John F. Kennedy, had been killed while he was president, just a few years before.

We had a presidential candidate assassination attempt in 2024, too.

Already back in April of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was leading many civil rights marches, was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. You probably heard about that one. They named a holiday after King.

Also back in April 1968, student protesters took over buildings at Columbia University. Again, sound familiar? It happened in 2024 also. Back in 1968 police violently removed the students.

On May 6, there were more violent confrontations which became known as Bloody Sunday. And that was in France. On Aug. 8, Richard M. Nixon was nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. You might have heard of him. In the middle of his second term, six years later, he became the only U.S. president to resign from office.

On Aug. 20, the Soviet Union (Russia) invaded Czechoslovakia. Sound familiar? Substitute the name Ukraine.

On Aug. 20, the DFL party held their convention in the city of Chicago. There was a massive protest against the war in Vietnam outside, while inside the convention they did choose Humphrey as their candidate for president.

There were days of violent clashes between protesters and the police and National Guard. Many claimed the police took forceful action without provocation under the direction of Chicago mayor Richard Daley.

On Nov. 5 (the same date as this year’s General Election), Nixon was elected president by a 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent margin over Humphrey.

There were, of course, many other things that happened in 1968. The summer Olympics were held in October and 32 nations boycotted them. Also, in October, Jacqueline Kennedy married a Greek man named Aristotle Onassis. Artist Andy Warhol was shot.

And, on Dec. 21, Apollo 10 orbited the moon for the first time. Astronauts took a picture of the Earth-rise over the moon surface. It seemed to show a very peaceful, beautiful world – which it wasn’t.

But it was a nice way to end the year that had been called the most tumultuous in recent memory.