The Worst Years in History (Yes, Worse Than 2020 and 2021)

Even though 2024 is a better year than previous ones, it's fair to say that the height of the pandemic was a lot of things: traumatic, stressful, challenging, and — for far too many — heartbreaking. The extended pandemic “has been the perfect storm of stress," says Seth Gillihan, a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and head of therapy at the self-therapy app Bloom. "It's brought disease, deaths, lockdowns, job losses, and financial stress, plus culture wars and bitter political divisions. The only small consolation might be that we now have better tools than we used to for dealing with it." But even if these might have been the worst years many of us can remember, history will likely prove them to be far from the worst ever. Bloom consulted 28 American and British historians for their opinions on the most stressful years in history. The results, starting with the most recent, provide a lot of perspective.

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For Americans, 2001 ranks among the worst for being the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which caused nearly 3,000 fatalities, more than 25,000 injuries, substantial long-term health problems for many, and at least $10 billion in infrastructure and property damage.

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A pivotal year for the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, 1968 is remembered for unrest that resulted in riots and protests in many U.S. cities, including Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and Cincinnati. It also saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

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For more than a month in the fall of 1962, many collectively held their breath during the Cuban missile crisis. This confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.

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In world history, this year ranks among the worst. The Holocaust was at its height, and much of the world was engulfed in war. In a period spanning mid-May to early July of this year alone, about 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to concentration camps, mostly to Auschwitz, where a vast majority were murdered.

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In the fall of this year, the worst stock market crash in U.S. history occurred, kicking off the Great Depression, which would last nearly a decade and fuel misery and hardship for many Americans for years. 

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The Spanish Flu gripped the world as it continued reeling from the trauma of World War I. Bloom's report noted that this year also saw "race riots, labor strikes, and the start of Prohibition." The pandemic would ultimately claim an estimated 20 million to 50 million lives around the world, including 675,000 Americans.

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More than one historian consulted by Bloom named this the worst year in U.S. history. It included the Civil War's Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history, which took a terrible toll of more than 3,500 killed and more than 17,000 wounded. "That was the darkest year in the Civil War, when it was clear that the price had already been high but the Union might still break apart permanently," says Philip Parker, historian and author of "World History: From the Ancient World to the Information Age."

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This year marks a dark stain on U.S. history: the Trail of Tears, resulting in the deaths of about 4,000 Cherokee. These only added to the many more Native American lives taken during the government's forced relocations following the 1830 passage of the Indian Removal Act.

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This is often called "The Year Without a Summer" after the massive 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora. The millions of tons of dust, ash, and sulfur dioxide spewing into the air resulted in harsh climate abnormalities that caused the coldest summer on record between the years of 1766 and 2000. The outcome: major food shortages and starvation across the Northern Hemisphere, most acutely in New England, Atlantic Canada, China, and parts of western Europe.

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This was a turbulent year for much of the world. The Thirty Years' War continued to rage in Europe (death estimates for that war range from 4.5 million to 8 million). In China the nearly 300-year-old Ming Dynasty collapsed, due to a number of factors that included natural disasters, economic crisis, peasant uprisings, and more.

Although it's chronologically out of order on our list — we're saving the worst for last — 410 marked the first time in almost 800 years that Rome fell to a foreign enemy. Many believed that the sack of Rome by the Visigoths foretold the end of the world.

COVID-19 is awful, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Black Death, which peaked in this year, killing a third of the European and Middle Eastern population, with a final tally of up to 200 million. This was the year that most of the historians consulted chose as the one "likely to have been the toughest, most difficult, and stressful individual year for those who lived through it," says Parker, who served as consultant historian on Bloom's study. "The devastation wrought by the Black Death in 1348 was so absolute that it was hard to choose any other year as the worst in world or British history."