Worst year of the US history

[Orser67]

The issue in answering this question for me is that a lot of the worst years to live in led to (imo) some great reforms; e.g. the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery and the 14th Amendment, the Great Depression led to the New Deal, and the troubled post-war period of the 1780s led to the U.S. Constitution. Even the frustrations and suffering of the early Civil War (which I certainly don't want to minimize) may been good in the long term, since we probably would have seen less far-reaching reforms with a shorter war.

So of the options in the poll, I might go with 1979, which was both a pretty bad year for the average American and resulted in the country shifting to the right. Now obviously, this is a heavily political take that not everyone is going to agree with, but my personal belief is that we as a country made a huge mistake in embracing the small government views of the Reagan Revolution. 1919 was also pretty bad for similar reasons, and 1968 also stands out as a particularly tough year that was sort of the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition era. Another one I might add was 1877, where we came reasonably close to a second civil war and ended Reconstruction, ultimately consigning most African Americans to decades of disenfranchisement and oppression.