7 Years Historians Say Were Worse Than 2020

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd say 2020 was great, but a group of 28 historians says there have been other years in US history that were even worse than this one, CBS News reports. In a survey conducted by self-help therapy app company Bloom, the academics from American and UK universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Oxford, as well as a few indie historical writers, were asked to select what they believed was the most stressful year ever in the United States. While 2020 definitely made that list, there were others that beat it out for the dubious distinction of worst year ever. Read on to see what those troubled times were:

1. 1862: The darkest year of the Civil War, including the one-day battle of Antietam, which killed 23,000 men.
2. 1929 and 1838: Tie for the Wall Street stock market crash and "Trail of Tears," respectively.
3. 1919: The worst year of the Spanish flu pandemic, which left 675,000 Americans dead.
4. 1968: The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
5. 1962: The Cuban missile crisis.
6. 2001: The Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Check here to see what years the same historians ranked as worse than 2020 in world history. (More 2020 stories.)