![People react near flowers placed on the road in tribute to victims, two days after an attack by the driver of a heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, France, July 16, 2016.]()
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?
The question of how to determine a “worst year” in history piqued my interest. So I decided to ask a group of historians to nominate their own “worst years” and to reflect on what constitutes a “really bad year.” Ten brave souls agreed to play this parlor game with me. Here are their picks.
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1348
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People talk about 2016 being a particularly disastrous year, but for a historian, there’s nothing new about people fighting for power or useless leaders with bad ideas gathering widespread support. All the current political upheaval is nothing compared with 1348, when the Black Death took hold.
The disease spread quickly along the Silk Roads and then across the trade routes crisscrossing the Mediterranean. In the space of 18 months, it killed at least a third of the population of Europe. “Our hopes for the future have been buried alongside our friends,” wrote the great Petrarch. It seemed like the end of the world was coming.
Some advised avoiding “every fleshly lust with women,” others that marching barefoot while self-flagellating would help. One writer in Damascus recorded that plague “sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power,” killing thousands every day. Dogs tore at the bodies of the dead that lay unburied in the streets.
That, I think, is what hell on Earth really looks like—and I’d rather be alive in 2016 than 1348.
If there’s one consolation, incidentally, it’s that the Black Death spurred one of the most golden of golden ages in history. Plague led to sharply reduced inequality, a spending boom, and a flowering of the arts. Storms do sometimes give way to sunshine.
1492
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Ought we measure the “worst year in human history” by some calculus of human suffering? By sheer number of deaths? By the geographical extent of misery? Any of these metrics provide ready candidates. I will suggest, however, that the worst year ought to be the beginning of a world-historical process that once started, offered little chance for reversal. I nominate 1492.
That year, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed their conquest of Moorish Granada. Within a few years, the roughly half-million Muslim inhabitants of the territory would be killed, converted, enslaved, or expelled. The kingdom also expelled its Jewish population, resident since Roman times, providing a blueprint for similar persecutions and expulsions in years to follow. Spanish actions helped create the idea of a geographically distinct “Christian Europe,” replacing the more than two millennia of political and religious identities that connected different Mediterranean shores.
The most significant event of that year, however, was the first American voyage of Christopher Columbus. Columbus wasn’t the first European to reach the western continents, but his voyages were the first to become widely known. As a result, Spain and its rival powers accelerated their overseas contest for trade and territory.
By the early 16th century, Old World diseases made their inevitable drift to the Americas, beginning the series of plagues that ultimately caused the demographic collapse of some 90 percent of the indigenous population by the mid-19th century, and for many groups, the utter obliteration of society itself. Worse still, as the indigenous labor force disintegrated, Europeans turned to Africa for new sources for New World enslaved labor.
Few years in human history are so freighted with catastrophic consequences.
1836
War on two fronts, in Florida against the Seminoles and in Alabama against the Creeks. One Georgia volunteer was toasted on July 4 for taking “an Indian’s scalp.” Toward the end of the year, the United States began preparations to invade the Cherokee Nation and forcibly remove its residents. After the state-sponsored mass deportations—the first in the modern era—who would cultivate the land?
The 1830s, if not precisely 1836, represented the peak of the interstate slave trade, with a quarter of a million enslaved people marched or shipped west to labor on fields that only a few years earlier had belonged to Native Americans. In Congress, pro-slavery politicians refused to hear anti-slavery petitions, passing the first gag rule in May 1836. In the words of one white Southerner, these were “flush times,” rife with speculation in Native American land and black slaves.
The year marks a high-water mark in the confluence of the nation’s darkest legacies: racism and reckless capitalism. The speculative bubble would collapse the following year, leaving behind hundreds of ruined banks and millions of dollars of worthless debt. The financial system would recover, but there was no second chance for the dispossessed.
As an avid carry-on traveler it amazes me how many people are still checking a bag. 
