A survey of historians says that despite 2020 being an incredibly challenging year riddled with issues including a global pandemic, economic decline and social isolation, to name a few, this year was actually not the most stressful in all of time. In fact, historians have ranked this year as the eighth most stressful year in recent U.S. history, CBS News reported.
The 28 participants of the study included historians from both U.S. and British universities, including Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as independent historical authors. The survey itself was conducted by Bloom, a self-therapy app company, which sought to compare this traumatic year to others in recent years.
"This year has been incredibly stressful," Bloom CEO Leon Mueller told CBS. "We wondered what other years down the ages had tested human resolve as much — or even more."
Voted the most stressful year was 1862, considered the darkest year of the Civil War, CBS reported. Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle of the war, saw 23,000 men killed from both the Union and Confederate.
A tie for second place was 1929, when the Wall Street stock market crashed otherwise dubbed Black Tuesday, which then led to the Great Depression and, 1838, known for the Trail of Tears, when thousands of Cherokee people were removed from their homes and forced to migrate to Oklahoma.
Next on the list goes as follows: the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic, 1968 when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, 2001 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and then, alas, 2020.
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