12 Infamous Historical Events Worse Than We Remember

1 - 10
11 - 12

12 Infamous Historical Events Worse Than We Remember

No matter how bad things are right now, it's important to remember that people in the past had it worse.

Published 1 year ago in Wow

No matter how bad things are right now, it's important to remember that people in the past had it worse. Even some of history's worst disasters are retold through rose colored glasses.

So which historical events are way more brutal than we remember? These 12 people took to Ask Reddit and gave their picks.

1
The aftermath of Katrina in and around New Orleans. I was down there twice immediately after the storm and the stench from dead bodies was almost overwhelming.

My sister and BIL bought a house on the other side of lake pontchartrain a few months later and there were STILL bodies floating up on the north shore of the lake.

2
Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment had way worse stuff than what the Evan Peters Netflix show portrayed.

3
The American Civil War. Old school war tactics meeting modern warfare, sprinkled with pre germ theory medicine practices resulted in a bad time.

4
The sinking of the Britannic. Though she sunk with significantly fewer casualties than her sister ship Titanic, many of the deaths were due to the fact that the lifeboats were prematurely launched while the ship was still moving, which resulted in some of the lifeboats being sucked into the propellers, instantly obliterating the passengers on them.

5
The 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion.

We are certain that the crew capsule part of the shuttle survived the explosion intact, and that the astronauts on board were alive for most or all of the following:

The crew capsule continued upward on a ballistic trajectory after the shuttle disintegrated, then plummeted toward the ocean at terminal velocity and anyone who was still alive died from the sudden deceleration, (splat), when they hit the surface of the ocean, which is basically like hitting concrete when you're going that fast.

”The crew cabin tore loose at 45,000 feet, arced upward to about 65,000 feet, and then began a 2-minute, 45-second plunge to the Atlantic Ocean.”

6
The McDonald's "hot coffee" case. So many people accused that poor woman of just wanting quick cash, but she was SEVERELY burned and only asked that her hospital bills be covered.

7
The atrocities carried out by the Imperial Army before and during WW2. Truly horrific and inhumane. Yes, the Americans, the Russians, and the British did some ghoulish stuff, but Japan’s Imperial Army committed next level cruelty. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) were responsible for a multitude of war crimes leading to millions of deaths, and they weren’t pleasant.

8
The Irish Famine. It was actually a genocide and gets downplayed quite frequently as the result of a potato blight, but it was more than that. The British shipped out any and every morsel of food available and the Irish were left with nothing to eat. Forced to eat grass or whatever was available, and others fled across the sea to America.

9
The Pacific Front of WWII. The more victories the allies got, the harder Japan resisted.

10
Vlad the Impaler. He would slowly impale dozens of people all at once, behind first, with an audience that often included the loved ones of the victims. Mehmed II was so horrified at the sight that he turned his army around.

11
The Great Chinese Famine from 1959-1961, with 15 to 45 million people dead, kicked off by the Great Leap Forward. Mao ignored technical experts, economic principles and established agricultural collectives, relying on peasants to figure out industrialization. The government tried to cover up conditions, which only made things worse.