On the 17th of January, 1918, the first serious battles took place between the Red Guards and the White Guard in the Finnish Civil War.
On January 17, 1937, Chicago School economist George Stigler was born. Awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize for his work on regulatory capture, oligopoly, information theory, and the history of ideas, Stigler memorialized his own history in Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist.
Other January 17th birthdays include Benjamin Franklin (1706), David Lloyd George (1863), and Nevil Shute (1899).