"Black Death." Online Media. World Book Advanced. World Book, 2015. Web. 3 Feb. 2015.
Matthew Pratt Guterl, Business Insider/Slate: I asked 10 historians to nominate the 'worst' year in history — here are their picks
When news of the truck killings in Nice, France, broke last week, I started seeing variations of the same sentiment on Twitter and Facebook: Is this the worst year ever, or what? Terror attacks, Zika, Brexit, police shootings, Syria, Trump, record-hot temperatures, the losses of Prince and David Bowie—this has been one unrelenting turn around the calendar.
Have terrifying events truly piled up on each other in 2016, in a way they didn’t in any other year in human history? Or is it impossible to judge the awfulness of a year while it’s still unfolding? Do we just notice negative happenings more these days because of our high levels of connectivity? And what does “worst year” even mean—“worst year” for Americans, for humanity, for the planet?
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WNU Editor: If I put on my historian hat .... I would nominate 1348 (Black Death). My Russian hat would be 1917 (Russian Revolution), followed by 1941 .... the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. My North American hat .... 1863 was the year of Gettysburg and the mid-way point of the American Civil War.
As for the future .... a nuclear war or a major catastrophic event like a super volcano or a massive meteorite strike .... that year would be regarded as the worst year in history.
1945 the year of the first atomic explosion, were all going to feel the effects of that one day, and that will be the worse year, all other bad years will pale in comparison.
ReplyDelete1996 when l got hitched :(
ReplyDelete1994, when my son was born and 1995 when my father died. all the other years are all bad in some way or another.
ReplyDeleteOh and my father was there when the first bomb went off. Los Alamos worker.
ReplyDeleteBad years aplenty.
ReplyDelete500 the start of the Dark Ages in Europe
1096 The first Crusade
1235 Statute of Merton first enclosure law
1484 Aztecs begin the practice of human sacrifice
1492 Columbus reaches the new world
1654 Anthony Johnson made the first legal slave in the U.S.
1770 the First (of many under British rule,) Bengal famine
1839 the first Opium War
1861 U.S. (first) U.S. Civil War
1874 Winston Churchill Born
1889 Addolph Hitler Born
1898 the Banana Wars begin
1899 the Philliphine -American War
1914 WW1
1918 Spanish Flu
1925 Margaret Thatcher Born
1929 Stock Market crash
1937 Sino Japanese War
1939 WW2
1941 Dick Cheney born
1948 first Arab-Israeli war
1950 Korean War
1952 first hydrogen bomb tested
1953 Joseph Stalin dies --- that's right..
1955 Vietnam War
1959 the first known case of HIV infection
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. Murdered ,1968 Jason Kenney Born _ coincidence?
1974 the Khmer Rouge take power in Cambodia
1979 Operation Cyclone approved and Margaret Thatcher is elected UK PM
1980 Ronald Reagan elected President of the U.S.
1986 Chernobyl Disaster
1988 Canada U.S. free trade agreement signed
1991 the end of the USSR, Yugoslav civil wars begin.
1994 Rwanda Civil War and first Chechnya war
2000 George W. Bush elected President of the U.S.
2001 9/11, invasion on Afghanistan
2003 the invasion of Iraq
Too depressing to go on. It's been all downhill since.
But on a good note,
2015 my first Grandchild was born... Look out World.