Four years worse than 2020: An Interlude

Monday I began a series on four years worse than 2020. That day I covered 1315, a year of famine and starvation. Yesterday we looked at 1348, the first full year of the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe commonly known as the Black Death. This year struck a little closer to home, albeit with much greater mortality and severer political, economic, and cultural effects. Today I want to take a step back for

An interlude

I had initially planned on including five years in this series, but lowered it to four as what began as one blog post grew longer and longer and longer. But even narrowing “worse years than 2020” to five was difficult at first. Here are six I considered including, both from the ancient and the more recent past, but that I want to at least look at briefly as way of further broadening our perspective.

1177 BC

I decided not to include this one because there’s no set, specific year for the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This is just the year the archaeologist Eric H Cline used as the title of his excellent book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Invasion, warfare, the widespread and destructive raiding of the mysterious Sea Peoples, and natural disasters drove the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean—Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and others—into total collapse, with a domino effect that took down the Assyrians and Babylonians.

AD 536

I include this date because I had several people independently mention it to me during the earlier parts of the year, when there was more hysteria and less numbness than now. 536, like 1177 BC above, is a bit of a catch-all for a series of events that played out over a decade or so in the 6th century, including a massive volcanic eruption that caused years of climatic disruption with knock-on effects including crop failure and the first major round of bubonic plague in Europe (“Justinian’s plague,” so called). Serious demographic decline, economic stress and collapse, military upheaval, and other problems resulted everywhere from Britain to China. This year was popularized as a “worst ever” by an article in Science a few years ago. You can read that here.

1863

To look at the United States alone:

At the beginning of the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a measure that has been lionized in the mythology of the national civic religion but actually accomplished little and was extremely unpopular, creating further upset in a North still reeling from the losses of defeats like Fredericksburg late in the previous year. Resentment over the draft and the unpopular shift of the war aims toward emancipation led to the New York City draft riots, racially-inflected mob violence that ripped through the city for almost a week. Several hundred were killed and many more beaten, including freedmen living in the city. The threat of violence was so serious that at one point a Gatling gun was even deployed on the roof of the pro-draft New York Times’s offices.

The Confederacy continued to struggle with supply problems and runaway inflation, and the heavy taxation necessary to support the war effort as well as draft laws viewed as tyrannical caused widespread dissatisfaction among ordinary Southerners. Women in overcrowded, underfed Richmond rioted when turned away by the governor of Virginia, who refused to hear their complaints. Numerous similar incidents occurred in other cities across the South.

On the front, Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill carried out his second raid on Lawrenceville, Kansas; several of the largest and most consequential battles of the American Civil War took place including Chancellorsville, the siege of Vicksburg, the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge; and the two bloodiest battles of the war, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Just the latter two accounted for over 85,000 casualties.

1916

The years of the Spanish Flu took more lives but have been talked about a lot this year, but 1916 was no less awful. World War I looms large as it continued to rage on multiple European fronts and in Africa and the Middle East. The wasteful Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, a revolt that had as its aim the creation of a unified Arab nation-state and ended in the partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Western powers, began; and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun took place which, between the two of them, killed over 600,000 men and wounded many more; and the Russians launched even bloodier offensives in the east. The Armenian genocide, begun by the Turks the year before, continued, with hundreds of thousands more Armenians killed in concentration camps, forced marches through the Syrian desert or in harsh winter conditions, and thousands of women raped. Natural disasters made the war even worse, as on the alpine Italian front, where avalanches in the Dolomites buried thousands. Elsewhere, the United States became further involved in the Mexican Revolution, committing thousands of troops in futile border raids to catch Pancho Villa, as well as invading the Dominican Republic; and the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin.

1933

In Germany: the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazi Party; the construction of the first Nazi concentration camps; the establishment of the Gestapo; the arrest and brutalization of Jews and political opponents; and the first moves toward rearmament, war, and the Holocaust.

In the United States: peak unemployment as part of the Great Depression and the first Dust Bowl storms; the beginnings of years of political controversy (for those who are into that kind of thing, especially where it concerns the Supreme Court) as FDR is sworn in.

In the Soviet Union: the completion of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, an infrastructure project using political prisoners that killed over 25,000; and peak starvation as a result of a man-made famine in the Ukraine, a punitive measure undertaken by Stalin the knowledge of which is suppressed with the active collusion of Western journalists. The famine ultimately kills over three million through starvation.

Natural disasters: earthquakes in California, China, and Japan, the latter with a resulting tsunami.

2001

This one really shouldn’t need an explanation. Not for my generation, at least.

Next

Tomorrow and Friday we’ll discuss the remaining two years that I’ve chosen for this project. Both of these years occurred within living memory.