2020 is in the rearview mirror, but many people still shudder when they think about it.
But it was far from the most brutal period to live through.
Here are some more of the worst times to be alive.
It was 1861, and the United States was one of the world’s youngest nations.
But it was about to be torn in two, as a fierce debate over the southern states’ right to
maintain a system of chattel slavery had boiled over.
The election of abolitionist President Abraham Lincoln had caused the crisis to reach a boiling
point, and before he even took office, a collection of southern states seceded and declared themselves
an independent nation - the Confederate states.
And after a skirmish at Fort Sumter, war was declared between the United States and its
rogue breakaways.
But things were about to go from bad to worse.
For the first time in the United States, the government instituted a military draft - and
so did the Confederate states.
Young men were ordered by the government to take up arms and fight for their side - whichever
side of the new border they were on.
That meant that you could wake up one morning, be told that your state had seceded, and be
ordered to fight against your own countrymen - or even your own family.
And if you were an objector to your side’s cause, good luck - the penalty for desertion
during wartime was death.
But not everyone was willing to go.
The draft did not go over well with some citizens.
In Tennessee, the eastern part opposed the Confederacy and secession was largely done
against their will.
Things got worse in New York, as a large group of draft-age men - many new immigrants - rioted
through the city and targeted black citizens who they blamed for causing the war.
The riots caused massive damages, killed over a hundred people, and eventually troops had
to be sent in by President Lincoln to quell the riots.
New York was largely untouched by combat - but not by the Civil War.
But for one group, things were just as dangerous as they ever were.
The Civil War brought hope to enslaved black Americans, but first they would have to survive.
In the years prior to the Civil War, laws were passed making it nearly impossible to
escape slavery, even by legally buying freedom.
It was common for free black Americans to be kidnapped and taken down south to be enslaved
- with a system largely rigged against them.
While Abraham Lincoln eventually issued a proclamation freeing all slaves in the south,
it would be a dangerous battle to get there.
The war would end - with a terrible cost.
The war would end in 1865 with the surrender of the Confederacy.
It would be a long, hard battle to put America back together, and when the dust settled estimates
are of over a million dead in total.
This makes it the deadliest war in US history - because for the first and only time, every
death on both sides was an American.
But it doesn’t always take a brutal war to make a terrible time.
Sometimes it just takes one man.
The year was 1932, and the Soviet Union was ruled over by Joseph Stalin, the second head
of the country’s communist regime.
He was known for being far more brutal than Vladimir Lenin, and any dissent was cracked
down on harshly.
That included the rising Ukraine independence movement, which had been building ever since
the Russian takeover of the neighboring country.
But a far bigger crisis was building.
The Soviet Union was a massive territory, ranging from eastern Europe to the far eastern
edge of Asia.
And that fast growth was about to lead to disaster.
Russia had industrialized quickly, which led to a drop in farming.
Additionally, natural disasters had cut down on the harvests.
What began as a food shortage developed into a massive famine that hit all of the Soviet
Union.
This led to millions of deaths, with an estimated 42% of Soviet-occupied Kazakhstan dying in
the famine.
It also caused serious malnutrition issues in pregnant women, leading to a rash of underweight
and sickly babies.
It would be a crisis that would define the early days of the Soviet Union.
But one place was hit harder than any other.
In Ukraine, the famine led to extreme starvation.
While urban workers were given rations, peasant communities were starved and died en masse.
The food soon ran out, and the city workers began starving as well.
Stalin’s response?
Showing them propaganda films depicting the peasant workers as counterrevolutionaries
who were stealing food.
This led the desperate Ukrainians to start turning on each other, with many being encouraged
to turn each other in for the hope of more food - which largely never came.
But starvation was only part of the nightmare.
Stalin used the crisis to tighten his control over Soviet society, imposing harsh laws that
punished any attempt to relieve the hunger.
Particularly notorious was the Law of Spikelets, which policed the collective farms and made
it illegal to glean leftover grain from the fields.
200,000 people were arrested for this crime, and Stalin soon targeted landowning peasants
and instituted stricter regulations on travel within Soviet territory.
The famine lasted two terrible years, with as many as ten million dying across the Soviet
Union and over three million in Ukraine.
That led historians to ask a dark question.
The famine in Ukraine in particular would become known as the Holodomor, for “to kill
by starvation”.
Many Ukrainians consider it a genocide, as Stalin seemed to use every opportunity to
make the crisis worse and treat them as guilty simply for starving.
It remains one of the darkest periods in the history of the Soviet Union.
But Stalin wasn’t the only dictator of the era to transform his society for the worse.
It was 1959, and Chairman Mao Zedong ruled over the People’s Republic of China.
The communist leader had won power in a bloody civil war, and now he aimed to transform society
into a modern communist society like the Soviet Union rather than a traditional agrarian society.
He announced the Great Leap Forward, a series of programs designed to collectivize farming.
Private ownership of farms was banned.
This was accompanied by orders to multiply grain yields far beyond the usual harvest
- sending farmers into a panic.
But the country wasn’t ready for this leap - and the consequences were deadly.
It led to three years of terrible famine, where the inefficient distribution and strict
quotas led many crops to be lost.
Additionally, Mao ordered the elimination of pest animals including flies, mosquitos,
rats - and sparrows.
The little birds were seen as grain parasites, but they also ate a lot of insects - and this
campaign actually made the insect problem worse.
Mao’s attempts to reinvent the economy also led to him ordering millions of Chinese to
reverse professions - farmers were ordered to switch to industrial work, while educated
professionals were sent to the countryside to become farmers.
It led to a massive loss in productivity.
The blame for this failure, of course, fell on Mao’s enemies.
The famine eventually ended, but struggles continued and dissent against Mao’s reign
grew.
This led to Mao taking greater control over all corners of Chinese society, instituting
a new educational system that would root out all elements that weren’t true believers
in his movement.
This led to the more notorious cultural revolution, where Mao’s loyalist groups of urban workers
and youth activists were riled up by claims that there were right-wing movements trying
to take down the government.
This led to brutal purges against senior officials and intellectuals.
The consequences for Chinese society would be devastating.
Even the Chinese president at the time, Liu Shaoqi, was purged and humiliated, dying soon
after.
The Down to the Countryside movement, which deported intellectuals to the countryside
to do farm labor, targeted ten million individuals.
The Cultural revolution lasted over ten years until Deng Xiaoping took over for Mao and
began liberalizing the country slightly.
In total, the industrialization, ensuing famine, and brutal repression led by Mao Zedong led
to a staggering death toll of at least forty million Chinese citizens - the worst of any
dictator in modern history.
It wouldn’t be the only time paranoia and repression brought a society to its knees.
The Roman Empire had fallen long ago, but for over a thousand years afterwards, the
Roman Catholic Church would remain the true power in much of Europe.
Based in the Vatican and ruled over by a Pope who set the doctrine, they were the only power
that even kings answered to.
From the 12th to the 15th century, they ran a series of courts across Europe for those
accused of heresy, with most being given the opportunity to repent and to penance.
But for repeated and unrepentant defiers of the church’s power, they faced imprisonment
or execution.
But in Spain in 1478, things were about to get much worse.
Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella agreed with the goals of the inquisition, but were unsatisfied
with the Church’s lax enforcement.
They wanted to ensure Catholic orthodoxy was enforced, so they created their own version
- the infamous Spanish Inquisition, which would be known more for its persecution of
religious minorities and harsh tortures of its victims than for chasing heretics.
Decrees were issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering all Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism
or be exiled.
But the Spanish Inquisition would be best known for the man who ran it.
Tomas De Torquemada was a Dominican Friar who became the first appointed Grand Inquisitor
of the Spanish Inquisition.
He was an obsessive man, who was particularly interested in rooting out Crypto-Jews - those
who had converted to Catholicism for political reasons and safety, but maintained some Jewish
religious practices.
His men spied on converts, looking for any evidence, and when they didn’t find it,
they would often create it - forcing confessions out of their targets through intense torture.
If there was one thing Torquemada was known for, it was his brutality.
Extreme tortures like the rack were used to extract confessions of heresy, and those convicted
on coerced confessions were usually sentenced to hang - or worse, to be burned at the stake.
Torquemada’s brutality was such that the Pope noticed an increase in clemency petitions
and questioned representatives of the Spanish Inquisition, but Torquemada had become a very
powerful person and was able to stay in power until his death in 1498.
And for the residents of Spain, under the Spanish Inquisition they were only a false
accusation away from brutal torture and an appointment with a burning pyre.
But sometimes humanity’s greatest enemy isn’t itself.
Sometimes it’s nature.
The year was 1815, and in the Dutch East Indies, Mount Tambora had been rumbling for a long
time.
Smoke had been coming from its plume.
But no one was prepared for what would happen on April 10th.
Three plumes shot up and merged, and a mass of flowing lava began pouring down.
Large pumice stones were shot into the air, followed by a cloud of ash.
A massive explosion expelled over ten billion tons of igneous rock, and spread a cloud of
ash around the whole island mass.
It would be the largest observed eruption in recorded history.
But the devastating consequences were just beginning.
As the dust settled, it became clear that this was the deadliest volcano disaster in
recorded history, with as many as ten thousand people killed immediately by the lava flows.
Around the disaster area, the heavy blanket of ash killed crops and led to lung ailments,
disease, and starvation.
Nearly another twenty thousand died later in the immediate area, and historians disagree
on the total casualties - with some saying it could be as high as a hundred thousand
from the local results of Mount Tambora’s eruption.
The effects, however, would not remain local.
As time went on, it became clear that the eruption had long-term effects not just on
the islands, but on the world’s climate.
The atmosphere had become filled with ash, and this caused a drop in overall temperatures.
In Asia, a combination of floods and frost led to a massive famine.
Europe’s crops had been suffering for a while, and the cold climate led to the failure
of wheat, oat, and potato harvests.
This led to riots, and the worst violence in Europe since the French revolution.
Even in North America, a persistent fog and an oddly red sun plagued the continent, and
harsh climates in the north caused crops to fail and prices to rise.
This dark period would eventually gain a unique name - The Year Without a Summer.
It would be several years before the haze would lift, and extreme temperature swings
were common.
During summer, it could shift from ninety-five degrees to thirty-five and kill crops in only
hours.
And the world, which was starting to industrialize, came to a harsh realization - no amount of
progress can overcome harsh natural conditions.
But the worst possible time to be alive was one that no human has ever seen.
It was around 250 million years ago, at the tail-end of the Permian Age.
Before the age of the dinosaurs, earth was filled with diverse life on land and sea.
Plants, animals, invertebrates, and vertebrates had created a lush ecosystem full of beauty
and terror.
The sea was ruled by massive arthropods known as sea scorpions.
Large reptiles and even proto-mammals lived on the surface.
It was the first age of large animals before the dinosaurs.
And then, suddenly, almost all of them would be gone.
The dinosaurs are believed to have gone extinct due to a meteor strike, though competing theories
still exist.
But the Permian Extinction actually dwarfs that devastating event in scope, with an estimated
83% of all genera of animals and plants dying off.
Not only did most large animals cease to exist, but the effects of this mystery extinction
were so bad that it became the only insect mass extinction in the history of Earth.
What event nearly led to the end of all life on Earth?
The culprit may be the same one as the Year Without a Summer.
In Siberia, a massive volcanic rock formation known as the Siberian Traps exploded, releasing
a world-altering amount of carbon dioxide into the air.
The animals and plants of Permian Earth, which had evolved to exist in a specific climate,
found the world itself suddenly unsuitable for their existence.
They couldn’t breathe the air.
The oceans were depleted of oxygen and became intolerably acidic.
And so began the Great Dying.
The only evidence of many of the species that went extinct are fossils, many in imprints
rather than solid bones.
The ecosystem of Earth took millions of years to recover, and the Triassic era began - and
with it, came the dinosaurs, the new kings of the earth - until their end came.
The Permian Extinction casts in stark relief just how fragile life on earth is.
It is the closest Earth ever came to becoming inhospitable to life - making it the worst
possible time to be alive.
Want to learn more about Earth’s darkest days?
Check out “What WasWorst Time to Be Alive in History”, or watch this video instead.