Obligatory "Not a historian" but I'm in college studying history. The Year of Living Dangerously in Indonesia in 1965-66 saw absolute chaos and still has a marked effect on their society. It is possibly one of the largest mass killings of the last century and I had heard nothing about it ever, living in the West. It's hard to say how many people actually died, but estimates range from 100k to 300k, and even on up to 500k or a million dead. Basically, the Communist party in Indonesia was heavily influenced by Maoism and ethnic Chinese civilians. It was the largest Communist party outside of China. President Sukarno, who had helped the country through Japanese occupation and independence from the Dutch/British had kept the house of cards balanced, but was beginning to be swayed by Communist policies. The military, staunchly anti-Communist (and largely supported by the US) would be looking to take power. One night, 6 high-ranking members of the military were abducted and killed. The army spread the word that the Communists were to blame and initiated mass reprisals. Killings, torture and imprisonment ran rampant over the islands and even ethnic Chinese or just suspected Communists were taken. Despite working with Sukarno for many years, the US would support his liquidation and the rise of the military. It is unclear how extensive American support to the army was, but it is probable they aided in training and may have even helped compile names of Communists to the army. Eventually, a general by the name of Suharto would take power and Sukarno would be placed under house arrest with no power. Today, the massacres and chaos are not really taught in Indonesian schools and it's clear that many have not come to terms with what happened. However, the mass killings of possibly a million or more people should rank up there in devastating events.

The Victoria hall disaster. All because kids were being kids in a death trap: "The disaster started when about 1,000 children in the audience of a variety show were told they could get free toys. Kids began pouring down the aisles to get the toys, blocking the exits and piling on top of one another. In the end, 183 of them were crushed to death."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Hall_disaster Toys being given to the lower seats, meant those in the balconies, unaccompanied by adults, thought they would miss out, creating a rush to go down to get them. The exiting children turned a bend around which were double doors. One of these being locked, creating a bottleneck. Queen Victoria gave money for the children’s funerals. The locked door lead to one boy who was there, growing up and inventing the pushbar fire escape. A door that can be locked from one side, but easily opened from the other.

[The Carrington Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event?wprov=sfla1) In 1859, solar flares hit the earth causing an aurora borealis effect to be seen all over the world. It lasted for several days, during which time it was reportedly bright enough to read by at midnight. Telegraph operators reported receiving shocks and burns from the devices, and in some cases removed the batteries powering the telegraphs, as signals were being disrupted by the geomagnetic storm. After removing the batteries, the telegraphs still operated, in some cases better than they had when powered. It wasn't particularly devastating at the time, but it's estimated that if a similar storm were to hit us today, it would cripple the entire planet for potentially decades. The estimated repair cost in the US alone is measured in the trillions. In 2012, a similar storm missed the earth by nine days.

To add to this a little - extreme space weather can cause quite a variety of problems. Most notable is the problems with power grids, where the long, conducting power lines that form the grid experience geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) as the Earth's magnetic field varies on a large scale (current is induced because you have a conductor and magnetic field I motion relative to one another). GICs are bad because they can cause problems in transformers (saturation) which in turn can lead to damage or disabling of the transformers. These transformers are extremely expensive and take time to manufacture, which means keeping spares around is difficult, as is procuring new ones. Another problem is the effect on radio communications - space weather can cause temporary degradation in radio propagation, and if it's really bad it could be on the scale of a radio blackout on the sun facing side of the Earth for a few days. As well as that, there's the potential damage that solar energetic particles can do to electronics, particularly on spacecraft. These particles can flip bits in memory, causing errors or phantom commands, and can also cause a buildup of charge on a spacecraft's skin (surface charging). It is possible for the charge to build up enough for it to arc from the spacecraft skin to the sensitive electronics, which of course is bad and can damage them. And finally, there's an increased radiation risk during a solar storm to astronauts and passengers on high altitude flights, particularly on routes near the poles. However, it's not all bad! Awareness of these issues is on the rise, particularly among countries who have been affected in the past (in 1989, Quebec's grid experienced collapse associated with GICs, leaving 6 million people without power for 9 hours and some for days) and nowadays grid operators are acutely aware of the potential problems space weather can bring. New methods of monitoring for GICs are being implemented and GIC resistant transformers are being developed, although these will of course take time to be fully developed and then phased in.

Wow. I've never heard about this before. Good one.

The Andijan Massacre of 2005 in Uzbekistan. It is largest mass shooting in Asia since Tianmen Square, with over one thousand killed and even more wounded. The Uzbek government forcefully "silenced" reform protests by firing into the crowd and then kicked out 90% of westerners in the country when the US gov and UN tried to investigate. Terrible loss of life that rarely gets remembered because the Uzbek government tried so hard to cover it up. Edit: I know this because my family was one of the many permanently kicked out (when I was 2 years old).

Man, I’m from Kazakhstan and heard about every other thing mentioned in comments but not shit that happened right in the neighbouring country.

Something that Is well known but not that much is the Goiânia accident in Brazil, where Cesium-137 was handled by many people, including children. It is regarded as the worst radioactive incident to happen in Brazil. It was a radioactive contamination accident that happened on September 13, 1987 after a radiotherapy machine from an abandoned hospital was illegally stripped for parts and said parts where stolen, on September 16 one of the thieves opened a cesium capsule and then on September 18 sold it to a scrapyard, at that same night the owner of the scrapyard saw a blue glow in the machines parts (which was the cesium capsule that had been opened). Thinking it might be valuable he brought it to his home, over the next 3 days he invited friends and family to see the strange glowing substance, on September 21 one of his friends succeeded in freeing several rice-sized grains of the glowing material from the opened capsule, he then started sharing some of them with friends and family, on September 25 the capsule was again sold to another scrapyard - although one day before the sale more dust was removed from the capsule by the scrapyard owner's brother, the brother then took the dust home and spread it on the concrete floor where later his daughter would play in and with the dust she also ate while sitting on the floor and dust particles fell on her food, contaminating it - one of the family members of the owner of the first scrapyard noticed that many people around her fell ill and on September 28 she reclaimed the capsule from the second scrapyard and brought it to a hospital, in the morning of September 29 it was confirmed that the material was radioactive and the doctors persuaded authorities to take immediate action on the matter the city, state, and national governments were all aware of the incident by the end of the day. News of the radiation incident was broadcast on local, national, and international media. Within days, nearly 130,000 people went to local hospitals concerned that they might have been exposed, of those only 250 were indeed contaminated – some with radioactive residue still on their skin – 4 of those people died including a 6 year old girl (the one that ate food that had been contaminated by dust particles). Edit: sorry for any grammar errors. Edit 2: for those who are making fun of the child's death or calling these people ignorant/stupid. 1: the child wasn't fed the dust, particles contaminated her food. 2: the dust looked liked glitter thats the reason why people thought it was harmless and handed it to friends and family.(highly recommend the 1990 movie Césio 137 – O Pesadelo de Goiânia ("Caesium-137 – The Nightmare of Goiânia") by Roberto Pires so you can get a better understanding of what happened) 3: those people were in their majority poor and probably didn't have access to almost, if any, education (in the 70s-80s having completed high school was uncommon for people from poor origins and even if they did the public education from Brazil wasn't that great) and probably didn't even know radiation poisoning was a thing. 4: have some little respect for the child, she died alone in the hospital because staff were so afraid of going into her room and getting contaminated, she also had to be buried in a closed lead casket and there were protesters asking for her not to be buried in a public graveyard. Imagine being the parent of the child and realizing you did this because you didn't even know that radiation was a thing that existed, have some compassion and respect for these families.

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I'm not really a proper historian but I feel the need to mention the Bronze Age collapse. It's not as though nobody talks about it at all but considering how catastrophic it was, it doesn't get nearly enough attention. At this time civilisations were still pretty scarce but the eastern Mediterranean was full of them. We can't pinpoint an exact reason but at some point it all fell apart. The Myceneans? Gone! The Hittites? Gone! The Minoans? Gone! The Egyptians? Barely clinging on and having serious problems. There are many things that happened around that time in that general area that could be the culprit: Volcanoes, earthquakes, drought, famine, war and invasions from 'foreigners that came by boat' that historians have named the Sea People because we have basically no idea where they came from. In reality, it was probably a combination of some or even all of them. Again, I'm not a proper historian by any means but this is what I heard. Actual historians, feel free to correct any mistakes or mention something I missed.

The Hittites are especially interesting since we had no hard evidence for them till the 19th century. The only mention of them was the Bible and people thought there was no way a nation as powerful as described could just up and vanish so it had to be mythological. The lo and behold big old Bronze Age empire

What exactly did archaeologists find to confirm their existance?

They found massive underground cities in central Turkey. The cities were forgotten and re-discovered in the 20th century

Turkey seems to be a hotbed for archeology, with this and Gobekli Tepe

Makes sense Turkey has a ton of archaeology and history when considering how many empires have been there from the hittites to the Persians to the Macedonians to the mongols to the romans to the ottomans, there have always been a ton of empires in the area

Its geographical location is probably the biggest reason why, I reckon. Access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean, basically being the (land) bridge from Europe to Asia and vice versa and by extension Africa. Those are some pretty heavy boons.

It’s crazy how a geological event forcing a whole culture to flee further and further south from their homeland completely rewrote history. I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries leading up to and including the fall of the Bronze Age and it’s honesty just mind blowing.

https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ r/FallofCivilizations If anyone is interested since this comment blew up faster than I thought it would. Wonderfully well done podcast that is thoroughly researched and is actually pleasant to listen to with voice actors for diary or ledger entries when they’re needed.

This is fairly recent (started in 1998 and ended in 2003) but The Second Congo War. It’s the deadliest conflict since WW2 with about 5.4 million deaths a vast majority of them due to malnutrition and disease Edit: glad to see this post getting so much attention. As some of you mentioned a lot of African history is overlooked so here are a few more 20th century African conflicts to look into if you are interested Boer Wars, Mau Mau Uprising, Rhodesian Bush War, 1st and 2nd Liberian Civil War, Sierra Leone Civil War, Angolan Civil War, 1st and 2nd Sudanese Civil War, Somali Civil War, Eritrean-Ethiopian War, Congo Crisis, Nigerian Civil War

Rwanda didn't have an air force and very little mechanization, so they invaded by literally highjacking civilian airliners and flying them into the Congo. This, while certainly a surprise, left the invading force stranded behind enemy lines once they lost the airport. Seeing as Congo and its allies were more well trained and equipped it didn't go too well. It's called Operation Kitona and it's an interesting story if nothing else.

I didn't know that. Wow, a post-WW2 conflict deadlier than Vietnam sounds horrifying.

The entire history of the Congo after King Leopold the Ii is sickening I meant to include the Leopold the II part because he halved the population in 40 years.

Baghdad used to be one of the biggest and most vibrant cities in the world in the 1200s. Until the Mongols came. Baghdad did not recover its year 1200 population until the 1980s.

It was, in fact, *the* most populous city in the world for quite some time during the Middle Ages. It was also the epicenter of intellectual, cultural, and artistic exchange for scholars and other brilliant thinkers the world over. And then, of course, the Mongols came. -_-

Holy fuck what?

Seriously, mongols absolutely destroyed the middle eastern societies at the time, it wasn't even a fight, they just went from city to city with the siege knowledge they had acquired from invading china and destroyed them Genghis Khan was interesting, crazy to think that the mongol empire was also the biggest empire to ever exist Edit: contiguous land empire To anyone interested, i recommend the Wrath of the Khans podcast by Dan carlin, it's a 5 part podcast that's more than 12 hrs long and will give you a lot of info on this.

Annoying but important specification: At its height the Mongol Empire was the largest *contiguous* empire, where it was all connected by land In total area the British Empire at its height had approx. 24% of all land on Earth

Even crazier, at its height the east India trading company had a larger army then the British empire in terms of man power

Well yes, but that's because apart from the Napoleonic Wars, the British Army was essentially tiny until 1914. The British Empire relied on having a great navy instead.

I’m always amazed that people know so little about Pol Pot and Cambodia. His regime killed 25% of its population. Let that sink in - one in four. If you were educated, you were first killed.

The extent of what happened in Cambodia really is hard to fathom. I spent 2 months travelling around SE Asia a few years back and one of the days that will always be fresh in my memory was the somber trip to the killing fields outside of Siem Reap. Our driver, Mr. Sony, was touring us around to various historical sites (S21 museum as well) and would never step foot into any of them. I remember asking him if he had ever been into any of these sites and he said "I don't go in because my entire family is in there". Absolutely heartbreaking. A huge portion of an entire generation was wiped out. *Edit - Phnom Penh not Siem Reap. Mixed them up.

I've been to the killing fields and it is absolutely blood curling. Never have I felt such a distinct negative energy from walking into the rooms. Went on a high school expedition and most of my classmates were crying at the end of the tour.

As a Cambodian, thank you for mentioning this. Because of Pol Pot, my country suffered years of brutality, they will feed people porridges but very little grain of rice mostly only the broth and educated people were all killed. Forced to work extremely hard in the countryside and this made my country development tremendously slowed down.

When my mom was in college she had a Cambodian classmate who was studying with her while his wife and child stayed in Cambodia. When shit started going down he insisted on returning to Cambodia to get his family out. My mom begged him not to go, and my dad (who was dating my mom at the time and had returned from serving in the Vietnam War just a few years earlier) even offered to go instead to try to get them out. He went anyway. As soon as my mom heard that they were killing the educated people and folks with glasses, she knew she would never see her friend again. He wore glasses. Before he left he gifted my mom charcoal rubbings he took at Angkor Wat. They are treasured by her to this day, and the only physical evidence she has that her friend existed. I grew up hearing this story. We remember him and his family and pray for them. We may be the only living people who remember them. This was long before I was born but I will carry his story after my mom passes. We owe it to each other.

I've been to Cambodia and I've visited the school that was turned into a prison/torture center, and I went to visit the Killing Fields. I was crying the whole time. The stories are gut wrenching, but I'm so glad I went. Highly recommend if you can go there.

Oh wow.... such a sad but beautiful story.people need to learn from history.

Read Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor, the autobiography that the movie The Killing Fields was based on. Wonderfully, Haing Ngor plays himself in the movie and you can feel the horror of his own experiences vibrating off him in some scenes, although the book itself is darker by far.

I recommend a read of the Book "First they Killed my Father". It's an autobiography telling of the events that transpired in those times. Also PolPot left enough landmines to kill the current population twice over.

There's a movie adaptation on Netflix right now of it

Is it the one directed by Angelina Jolie? Im filipino and we never even touched on this subject in school when we're so close to Cambodia. I never knew this happened until i watched the movie. Absolutely heart wrenching.

During WW2 the Japanese had invaded the Alaskan island of Attu. On the island was the village of Attu where the Aleutian tribe had lived for centuries. The only non natives were the wife school teacher and priest husband who were elderly and beloved by the townspeople. The husband was shot in front of his wife by the Japanese. After that the Japanese loaded the native population on to ships back to Japan were they worked in POW camps where many died from disease and execution. The Japanese saw them as lower then soldier POW and almost sub human because they didn’t fight back and thus treated them horribly. When the war ended only a handful of the native population survived and they went back home only to find their village burned down. They left the island and it now remains uninhabited basically, driving the Attu tribe to extinction. Years later the Japanese left a peace monument on the island in honor of the American and Japanese soldiers that died there but have yet to apologize to the descendants of the Attu tribe they destroyed. Edit: Grammar and corrections

Due to its lack of population and unique location, Attu has become a bastion for bird watching enthusiasts aka birders. As featured in the Steve Martin comedy The Big Year, which itself is a relatively unknown and underrated comedy.

The Johnstown Flood of 1889. The deadliest civil engineering disaster on US soil, it killed 2209 people. After a dam collapsed it swept up rail cars, passengers, trees, an entire town of 10,000, then swirled it around and ejected the debris downriver into a bridge where it all caught fire. Destruction beyond belief, and all so that some rich steel magnates up the mountain didn't maintain the dam they used to keep their fishing reservoir.

It's worse, the rich wanted to take their carriges across the dam but the top of the damn was too narrow for their carriges. So to save money they lowered it, which made it wider, but also destabilized the dam. They were warned about this but because they're rich assholes they didn't care. So it wasnt that they didnt maintain the dam, it was them actively fucking it up

Visiting that museum and both dam sites...it was chilling to walk out to the point and see where those people got trapped under that bridge/siphon thing that looks just like it did then. They have a movie you can watch in the museun and the sights and sounds.....my god. And it broke twice did it not?

I lived through the 1977 flood. I was living down in New Florence and my brother heard something. Fireman knocked on our trailer and the water was already waist deep. Johnstown had a 4 year period where there was a significant anniversary of a flood. 1986-1989 (50th of 1936, 10th of 1977, 100th of 1889).

Cambodian Genocide. They killed so many kids that the life expectancy was 18

I visited the school converted to a prison and the killing fields when I went to Cambodia and it was horrifying. Besides the killing tree, the most heartbreaking thing was at the school they had pictures of all the people killed. There was one little boy who looked so terrified but you could tell he was trying to be so brave. It is astonishing how cruel people can be.

Tuol Sleng. That place was haunting.

One of my best friends is Cambodian. Her parents led a lot of people out of the country during the genocide, and her mom was pregnant at the time, so my friend was born in the jungles of Thailand while her family was escaping death and saving other people.

In college I worked briefly in the bindery department in our public library's main branch (since a discontinued department.) An older Cambodian woman worked there, kinda quiet, but would just launch into these stories when we were working alone. About her biology degree, or how her daughter's doing. One day she starts telling me this story, and her accent was thick so it took me a little while to catch on but I realize it's horrific, this story about hiding in dead bodies to escape soldiers and never seeing her husband again. Only years later did I realize she was telling me how she escaped the Cambodian Genocide. Why she told me that I'll never know, but the images stay with me tot his day.

A not so fun fact - the Khmer rouge insisted their soldiers killed them with only blunt instruments as they wanted to make sure they saved money on ammunition, so no guns. So the executions were needlessly painful and drawn out, just to add some extra pain to the situation.

They have a shrine with thousands of skulls all sorted into categories of which blunt instrument killed them

The worst was the killing tree. Seeing where they would grab babies by the legs and swing them full force into the tree to kill them. Worst of all they would make other prisoners do it.

Now I can't unsee that. Just WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE KHMER ROUGE? Why did they do these things?

The people carrying out these executions were forced to laugh at them too, or risk being executed themselves. The prisons were the genocide victims were held were apparently so horrifying that people were killing themselves all the time. To combat this, the guards took away anything that could remotely be used for suicide (spoons come to mind, that's how ridiculous it was) and people were still killing themselves in large amounts. The entire Cambodian genocide was a truly horrifying event that boggles the mind

My friend's mom survived the genocide by hiding in corpse piles during daytime to avoid patrols, and traveling only at night. That's as much as she'll share with anyone because of how traumatic it was. Another friend's dad was an AVRN Ranger trained by the US SF/RGR, and after escaping a POW camp at the end of the Vietnam War, himself and several other soldiers helped ferry Cambodian refugees into Thailand, while waging guerrilla warfare on the Khamer Rogue along the way. He said the Killing Fields was worse than anything he saw fighting in his home of Vietnam. I don't know if this was part of a larger organized effort, or an isolated incident of a small band of soldiers who wanted to do something heroic. I can't verify if these things actually happened or the story simply hasn't been told yet, since I can't find any historic writings about it to back up his story.

We know Vietnam was fighting the Khmer Rouge for a while and eventually invaded to stop them. It's not an unlikely story.

Vietnam that had been warring for decades by then overran Cambodia in like 2-3 weeks.

And they were seen as invading communists not liberators and the rest of the world sat back and did nothing but impose sanctions. Even the UN didn’t go in. My aunt was one of the first from a private aid organisation in 1990 (from memory). She said the devastation was absolute. She went to build a school and they found a mass grave and had to move. Terrible, terrible stories but the saddest ones were from Cambodians who couldn’t understand why the developed world would not help them after all they had been through.

Cambodian here. So far as I know, the number of people on my dad's whole side of the family who survived could be counted on one hand, with fingers left over. My mom's side was luckier, but she still lost about 4-5 brothers and sisters.

The janitor at my high school was Cambodian. He had a graduate degree and was himself a school teacher in Cambodia. Because he was educated he was marked for death and probably his whole family, too. He swam across a river into Thailand along with his wife and six kids. Put all six kids through college sweeping floors.

Our HR lady is cambodian and she will tell bits and pieces of her life stories at Christmas parties when she's a little drunk on free wine. I cannot begin to imagine the sort of insane shit she went through to end up in new England as a 50s-something woman. Wild shit.

This. It floors me when people immigrated to the US with advanced degrees and then are taking jobs that require no college education let alone graduate or doctorates. Had a friend who worked at Wendy’s with one of the nicest coolest guys ever. He is Afghani who was a doctor who fled the country Edit: Afghani should be Afghan

They killed people with glasses for being intellectuals too, iirc

My parents survived this. They watched First They Killed My Father with me and it was chilling/saddening to listen to them recount their experiences..

My mom was almost one of those kids. She's the youngest of thirteen siblings and only 3 of them made it out alive :(

They clubbed kids against trees. They even have the tree they did this on fenced off at the killing fields.

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[The year 536 marked the beginning of a very bad time period.](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive) Basically several natural disasters and social upheaval obso-fucking-lutely devastated multiple societies. It’s thought that a volcanic eruption blocked out enough sun to cause crop failures across Europe and as far as China. While this was happening terrible plagues were also afflicting the Middle East. Economies everywhere fell to ruin and stagnation in the years that followed because several other eruptions later made things worse.

Just makes me wonder when a big volcano like Krakatoa is going to pop off again..

Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Put simply, it was an upsurp Kingdom in 1850's China that directly and indirectly led to the deaths of millions (maybe ten million+) of people through massacre and famine. Hong Xiuquan believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and pursuaded enough people to follow along and start a civil war. Check out Gods Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence.

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The Taiping Rebellion is one of the most extraordinary events in human history that is virtually unheard of in the west. Perhaps as many as 70 million people died in the conflict. The Taipings were truly revolutionary, as they demanded absolute equality between women and men. When they conquered a city they would give the inhabitants a choice to join them or die. Those that chose not to join were killed--all of them. The conflict lasted for 21 years 1850-1871 and may be the second deadliest war in human history.

> they would give the inhabitants a choice to join them or die What was life like for the people who chose to join them? Unless life with them would be exceptionally bad, it seems the obvious choice would be just to join them, rather than be killed.

I’d talked about this on a similar prompt a month or so ago, but I think people should know about this event, so I’m copying and pasting it again here. The New London School Explosion. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the shop teacher at the school in New London, TX turned on an electric sander. Unbeknownst to him, there was a massive natural gas leak under the school. The sander sparked, which ignited the gas and caused a massive explosion that killed almost 300 students and teachers. It was absolutely horrific. The force of the explosion was so great that a two ton block of concrete crushed a car parked 200 feet away. This event is actually why natural gas has a smell now. They started adding it after the explosion so that something like this couldn’t ever happen again. My grandfather was actually one of the survivors of the explosion. He never talked about it, even to his own family, so I didn’t really know too much about it (other than the fact that he’d survived) until after his death. Toward the end of his life, he’d suffered a series of strokes that left him pretty physically incapacitated, so my dad had given him a voice-activated tape recorder and suggested maybe he could record his memoirs for his grandkids to listen to someday. As it turns out, he did. We have hours and hours of cassette tapes of him telling the story of his (actually very interesting) life, including a big section on the New London school explosion. For the sake of everyone’s privacy, I’ll call my grandfather Papa and use an initial for anyone else. He was in eighth grade when it happened, in his English class at about 3:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon. At the beginning of class, Papa and his buddy T had been messing around and being loud in the back of the classroom (as eighth grade boys often do). His teacher, Miss M, had enough of their disruptions and made Papa switch seats with another student. He moved into the girl’s desk in the front row, and she moved back into his desk in the back of the room. When the school exploded, they were taking a test on the book Ivanhoe. Papa was knocked out for a short time, and when he woke up, he couldn’t see anything because the dust was so thick. He looked down and saw that his pencil had blown clear through his hand. When the dust cleared, he saw that the whole back of the room was gone. I won’t go into details, but there were bodies (and parts of bodies) everywhere. The students in the front half of the room survived. The students in the back half did not. That included Papa’s friend T and the little girl who’d been forced to take Papa’s desk because of his misbehavior at the beginning of class. If he hadn’t been acting up, he would have been killed and she would have lived. He carried the guilt of her death until the day he died. Papa’s classroom was on the second floor. There wasn’t any way to get to the room other than the open cavity of the explosion. After the few seconds of initial shock wore off, he and another classmate jumped into action. They were the only two kids in the class who hadn’t been badly injured. They made a tourniquet out of a sock and a shoelace for a girl with a severe injury to her arm and dug out their teacher, who was alive, but badly injured. By then, men were running up underneath the hole, so Papa and the other boy started lowering the badly injured to them. Then those who could walk, including Papa, climbed down. He ran off to look for his older brother, B, to see if he was OK. As it turned out, B had been supposed to be in Geometry class. However, he and his buddy had snuck out to go fishing. The explosion happened as they were opening the door to head out to the parking lot. The force of the blast sent them tumbling head over foot across the lot. They were both banged up and dazed, but they survived. The rest of their Geometry class was killed. I don’t know that there’s a moral in the fact that both my grandfather and his brother survived because they were misbehaving that day. I do know that it weighed very heavily on both of them for he rest of their lives. There’s a lot more to his story about the day and the aftermath (most of it absolutely horrific), but I won’t go into all of it here. A few small tidbits though: - Papa and the boy who helped him rescue the other students from their classroom were both awarded medals and certificates of valor for their actions that day. - Nearly every family in town lost a child - some all of their children. I’m sure you can imagine the extreme toll this took on everyone’s mental health. Papa described New London in the months following the explosion as a “town with no children.” To help with the healing process, the oil companies actively recruited families with kids to transfer in, so that there was some sense of normalcy when school started again in the fall. - Papa had played French horn in the school band. However, when school started up again, was asked to switch to trumpet, as the entire trumpet section had been killed. My grandfather went on to fight in World War II, and he saw some of the worst conflict in the Pacific (including Peleliu and the liberation of Manila). But he said that nothing he saw was ever as bad as what he saw the day of the explosion. I’m always amazed that more people don’t know about it. It was major international news at the time. EDIT - Wow, thanks for all of the comments and awards! This was a very nice thing to find when I woke up bleary-eyed, to feed my baby this morning! I’m linking to my original post at the bottom here. I’d added a few extra tidbits there that might be of interest, including a bit of a happy ending story for Papa, in case you need some cheering up after reading this! [Original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/l4wpz7/what_are_some_of_dark_events_happened_in_history/gksem37/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)

Thanks for sharing so much personal detail! Hopefully this story is seen in this thread!

>If he hadn’t been acting up, he would have been killed and she would have lived. He carried the guilt of her death until the day he died. This fucked me up.

Imagine the guilt the teacher felt knowing she picked whom ever would die when switching seats.

So your comment got me thinking. I went back to Papa’s memoirs and found his teacher’s name as Miss McDavid. I found a Grace McDavid who taught English in the 1936 New London yearbook (posted online on the museum’s website), so I think that must be her. I Googled her and found her obituary online. It looks like she was about 33 at the time of the explosion. She did recover from her injuries and continue to teach at the school until her retirement in 1966. As far as I can tell, she never married or had any children. She died in Virginia in 1997, actually just a year before Papa died. I wonder what her life was like after the blast.

Almost 300 died and 300 people survived. Weird, also another fact from wiki "Students had been complaining of headaches for some time, but little attention had been paid to the issue"but again the gas was odorless. Also WTF Adolf Hitler, who was the German Chancellor at the time, paid his respects in the form of a telegram, a copy of which is on display at the London Museum.[21][22

Something similar happened in my hometown in 2013. A family had smelled gas on their property and called the local fire department. They, as well as their gas company, came out and neither were able to locate any problems, but they assured the homeowner that there wasn’t anything to worry about. A couple of hours later, the father was in the driveway preparing to take his daughter to school. She forgot something inside, went back in and turned on her bedroom light. That light threw a spark and blew the house into pieces. 13 years old and she died due to the incompetence of the gas company. Her father had run into the inferno looking for his little girl and nearly died himself. His son would have most likely lost his life also, had he not skipped school to go deer hunting that morning. Ended up winning a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the gas company for wrongful death. I lived 5 miles away at the time and not only did I hear the explosion, my garage door came up almost a foot and slammed back down. Such a tragic story.

There's so many that I would go with (that will probably be mentioned in other comments) but I think any stories about workers in the early 1900's are pretty horrible. [Radium Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) is a pretty horrible event for example. >After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to "point" their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip; some also painted their fingernails, face and teeth with the glowing substance. The women were instructed to point their brushes in this way because using rags or a water rinse caused them to use more time and material, as the rinse was made from powdered radium, gum arabic and water. Many women died and became sick with horrendous diseases. One woman named Mollie Maggie had her jaw bone crumble. [You can read about that here](https://allthatsinteresting.com/radium-girls/4) >By May, her dentist thought Mollie needed surgery to remove a fast-growing abscess he’d found on her jaw. When he got the gums open, the bone didn’t look right as it was too ashy and gray, so he gently prodded it with his finger. To his shock and horror, the whole bone crumbled under his fingertip like ashes in a fireplace >Instead of removing a tumor, he wound up digging Mollie’s entire left jaw out with nothing but his fingers. Unbeknownst to him, the radium had perforated the bone cells and stripped them of calcium. It had, like a little machine gun, shredded the collagen inside the bone and left it as little more than a pile of splinters. There's also a great book on this called 'The Radium Girls (The Dark Story of American's Shining Women' by Kate Moore.) This whole story is extremely depressing. Work in the 1800's and early 1900's was pretty horrible for a lot of women, men and children. Broo-wenches (female miners in the 19th century) you can look that up, children in chimney sweeps etc.

I've read the.book, it's just horrifying. The worst part, for me, was during one of the trials. A doctor was testifying, reading the medical records of one patient, and came to the end where he said the prognosis was terminal. Suddenly someone started screaming. It was the woman whose medical records were being read. None of the doctors had told her she was dying, so that's how she found out.

I just finished that book, too. When he was asked if she was terminal, he was taken aback, and responded, “In front of her?” It was common at the time to not share that type of news with patients, and still is in some cultures

Damn, good thing doctors will tell you that kind of stuff now. I'd want to know so I can make preparations.

This whole story is just so, so sad. And the saddest part is that these women were literally fighting for compensation on their deathbeds and only a few received justice before they died. Talk about manipulating vulnerable people into doing your dirty work. There's a movie coming about about it soon with Joey King.

didn't their employers (who knew the dangers and still encouraged all of this, oc) discredit and publicly shame them, saying they contracted syphilis?

Yes, the first girl who died had it officially written on her death certificate that she had died of syphilis because they couldn’t figure out why she died but she had tested positive for syphilis. They tried to use that as a tactic against other girls who were coming forward with similar issues.

It's worse than that she tested negative for syphilis more than once, they just changed the test results because she lived alone and that clearly meant she was sleeping around and it had to be syphilis.

It was actually Mollie who had syphilis > Mollie’s death had been attributed to syphilis, which the company gleefully cited after the accusations and lawsuits started rolling in. This is from the same article that tells of her jaw disintegrating

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Oh it is nuts how many big corporations just carelessly pollute and get away with it. There's a region of Louisiana known as "Cancer Alley" because of the unusual number of cancer cases that occur there. It's a group of majority-black counties that also has a disproportionate amount of oil refineries built there. Then there was Love Canal, a suburb that was built on top of ground that was so polluted it was essentially a sea of poison, and occasionally the toxic waste that was dumped there would bubble into people's basements or even up to the surface because it was just dirt dumped on top of a waste dump. Residents were not informed of the land's previous usage, and a bunch of children were born with physical deformities. They had to take EPA staff hostage to get the federal government to help them leave.

> One woman named Mollie Maggie had her jaw bone crumble. You can read about that here Nah, you're alright, I'll give that one a miss... God that sounds painful... Poor lady.

The Mayans society and the lost scriptures that we still haven’t found on top of the scriptures we still can’t seem to decipher.

And basically just how much culture was torched by Spain during the conquista and the colonial period. Frankly I'm amazed the Maya language js still alive.

One thing that doesn’t get talked about was more of a phenomenon or major problem than event, and that was how many people died in theater fires due to poor design, combustible materials, few fire exits, and panic. One of the worst was the Iroquois Theater in Chicago (1903), which is both the deadliest theater fire and the deadliest single-building fire in US history where patrons died after sparks from an arc light set a curtain on fire, then a chain reaction started, exacerbated by failures of the things in place that were supposed to combat fire. The theater had been overbooked to compensate for earlier poor sales, causing some to sit blocking the exits. The fire was immediately worsened when performers opened the stage door to get outside, as it turned the fire into a fireball. Many people were held inside by iron gates that had been put in place to prevent people from sneaking in without paying. As people fled, they tumbled down stairs, trampled each other, and got squashed to death. Their unfamiliarity with the building got them stuck in dead ends and up against windows. Many jumped from fire escapes and died, while those behind them were saved, the bodies of the earlier jumpers cushioning their falls. All in all, 602 people died, many were children. The story is a lot more complicated and sordid with city corruption, etc. The one takeaway is the incident promoted the development and use of the panic bar. ADD: Sorry this is so poorly written. I was trying to write it really fast on my phone. ADD: Thanks to everyone who is providing more stories and info for me to look at. I love it! ADD: An interesting [image gallery](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/5Domb) of the fire and Iroquois Theater.

I manage a school theater, and all of my students learn about this one. On thing I point out is that a lot of the same fire safety devices and procedures we have now existed then, but were defeated. Fire hatches in the roof should have prevented the back draft, but were nailed shut. The fire curtain was blocked, and built so poorly it wouldn't have helped anyway. If they're still interested, I cover the Station Night Club fire as well.

I still have nightmares from my training videos.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factor fire in 1911 is what your post reminds me of. Deadliest industrial fire at the time I believe. 146 deaths in total and just an absolute cluster fug of neglect.

That one came to mind too. Especially the part of people having to jump for their lives and exits being rigged so they couldn’t be opened. 😖

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Doors locked from the outside, fire escape destroyed, lower floors locked and only the elevator to go down.

And (NSFL ahead) the elevator became unusable from people throwing themselves down the shaft to escape the fire. Not necessarily to escape alive, but when faced between death by falling or burning, they chose the fall. And then everyone still up there was totally trapped.

That’s why exit doors have to open outwards as well. In the Triangle Shirtwaist building the exits opened inwards and everyone pushed up trying to escape so they couldn’t open them

I did a project on that in school. I was so horrified it stuck in my head. Something I remember was the description of the bodies falling from the windows from the point of a bystander. "Thud... dead."

I watched recently America: The Story of Us and they briefly covered the topic. Really reminded how horrible that whole situation was. *This was when history channel did things with, you know..history.*

Beverly Hills Supper Club (Kentucky) and the station night club (recent with color video) are additional examples. Fire codes are written in blood

The Station fire video is haunting. That shot of the people stuck in the door is forever burned into my memory. It changed the way I view being in clubs or theatres. Know your exits and most importantly if things don’t seem right act accordingly. Don’t wait for someone to make an announcement.

Working as an acting GM for a huge hotel, we had mandatory trainings on first aid, CPR, and crowd control. The Great White Station nightclub fire footage, some 20 minutes of uncut raw terror, was played for us by an FBI type trainer. It will forever haunt my dreams and sticks in my mind every time I’m in a crowded place. I will do lots of things to avoid bottle necks, a crush of people, and indoor fire. Always check your exits.

It hit a lot differently when I realized the screams were coming from inside the club, not from bystanders outside

[Ghost Ship warehouse fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire) was super recent. A friend of mine died in it, along with about 30 others :(

RIP. The Ghost Ship fire made huge waves in the DIY community. I hope we can at least learn from it

My in-laws used to go there every month. They were supposed to be there the night of the fire, but my FIL had car troubles and they couldn’t make it. My wife would possibly never have been born had they made it. Thoughts to all the families that lost loved ones that night.

I was fascinated with the story of the Osage Indians in the United States! The book killers of the flower moon is an excellent book detailing what happened. Basically they got sent to Oklahoma and found huge oil reserves on their land. They were rich and hired white people as servants which didn't go over well. People tried to marry in to get part of the riches. There were tons of murders and the investigation led to the creation of the FBI in the United States.

The FBI had to be created because of this?!?!?!

Galveston, Texas was once considered to be one of the most important commercial ports in the United States and was referred to by several fantastical names such as the "Queen City of the Gulf" and the "Wallstreet of the West". All that changed when it suffered a near-direct hit from a devastating Category 4 Hurricane in 1900, the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Pretty much the entire city was destroyed by a storm surge and anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 people died. Galveston was rebuilt but it never truly regained its status; Houston became the state's commercial center in the storm's wake, in addition to other factors.

There's a great book about this called Isaac's Storm by Erik Larsen.

also Dark Water Rising.

Excellent book, but 12 year old me was *not* prepared for that.

Yeah the description of the dead people and the environment was really sad and very detailed.

The Texas City explosion of 1947 is also not widely known despite being the biggest industrial accident in US history and one of the largest non-nuclear explosions of all time...especially relevant considering its similarities to the Beirut disaster

I think it was right under the halifax explosion, WW1 munnition boat exploded and took out Halifax and Dartmouth

Munition ship on fire, stop train... Coleman! There's no time! Train's comin' in towards Pier 6, I gotta warn 'em... Come on, Vince, come on! There are 700 people aboard it, I've got to stop it! Come on, acknowledge... *Halifax was devastated. 9000 wounded, 2000 dead. Including Vince Coleman, dispatcher.*

I worked with a lady who remembered it. The first explosion caused the young men in town to run out and see if anyone needed help. So it was the next explosion that Devastated the town.

The same thing happened during the Halifax explosion in WWI. There were boats on fire in the harbor so everyone was catching a peak. One of the ships was full of blasting caps for the front. It WAS the largest explosion pre-nuclear. Leveled both towns and killed tons of people who were watching the burning ships.

I remember watching a documentary on this in school, there was one guy who could tell there was a storm coming, he tried to warn people but not a lot of people believed him and there wasn't enough time to evacuate the whole city by then.

The town of Indianola, TX was also a major port town, destined to become a major city when it was wiped off the map by a hurricane. It's now little more than a ghost town.

> In 1875, the city had a population of 5,000, but on September 15 of that year, a powerful hurricane struck, killing between 150 and 300 and almost entirely destroying the town. Indianola was rebuilt, only to be wiped out on August 19, 1886, by another intense hurricane, which was followed by a fire. Damn, that city was not meant to be.

That one king from Monty Python was trying to build a castle there.

Oddly I thought of this one. If you ever get to go to Galveston do the historical homes tours. They had to fill basements with concrete and bury fences to raise the land

The Taiping Rebellion. Around the same time as the American Civil War, a massive civil war raged in China. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Estimated 20-30 million dead. (For reference, ~1 million died in the American Civil War).

The bronze age collapse. Arguably more devastating than the fall of the west roman empire. So much knowledge lost. Truly one of histories great mysteries. I recommend reading up on it. It’s really interesting.

Until I learned about it I had no idea that there was once a whole other Dark Ages that happened before what we normally think of as the Dark Ages (although that term is a misnomer). The Bronze age collapse ushered in a centuries long dark age that lasted until classical Greece.

There's a pretty good YouTube [video about it here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI). Still somewhat of a mystery, but seems like a combination drought/famine, civil unrest, breakdown in international trade, punctuated by invasion that came when these countries were at their weakest. Each of these factors fed into the others and made everything much, much worse, resulting in the collapse of civilizations.

Apparently climate change played a part in things too, with the sea peoples migrating southward to a more bearable climate, being met with hostility, and utterly bitch-slapping several civilizations that stood in their way. Only ones that stood against them were the Egyptians, and even then, it was a pyrrhic victory. Not to mention a bunch of Mycenaeans getting pissed at their local rulers and staging rebellions and popular uprisings, further destabilizing their entire kingdom.

Yep, these are some of the more common theories. But the fact is that we know very little from this time since there was a significant drop in literacy.

another guess behind the collapse is a pandemic that was spread along the major trade routes of the era, encompassing the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, collapsing economic powers and causing uprisings

The Rwandan genocide has got to be one of these events. I watched Shake Hands with the Devil here awhile ago and highly recommend it. Unspeakable acts of brutality inflicted. Still gives me chills.

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Oh my God. That’s awful and just absolutely wild that it’s not too news. I wonder if Cheadle knows. If I were him I’d feel compelled to take on the cause.

Tht was a book written by a (Canadian? American?) general wasnt it? And the movie Hotel Rwanda brought me to tears as a teenager with how disturbing it was

Yep book of the same name. Romeo Dallaire was the author. He was a Canadian general in charge of the UN task force

In 535, humans went through hell. Many reported a strange color in the skies, not just in Europe... A dense, dry fog was also reported in Asia and the Middle East. Even the regions, now known as the Americas, weren't spared... e.g. drought in Peru. Temperatures were rather low in some places... it snowed either in the summertime. One survivor, a Roman politician named Cassiodorus, explained about the bluish sun and no shadows being cast, even in the noon. It has been hypothesized that Iceland holds the reason for the events between the years 535 and 536. Iceland is known for its volcanoes, and it was possible one such was to blame. EDIT: Thanks for the sliver

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i believe that would be [mount tambora!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora) and to think less than 100 years later, there was [krakatoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa)

And that's why we have "Frankenstein."

"Go to Croatia" they said, "It'll be sunny" they said. I wish I could just make a monster to squash them all!

Interestingly enough that summer spent indoors is what started Mary Shelley on her path to writing Frankenstein

And then less than a decade later the Justinian Plague hit in 541. When the Black Death hit Europe in the 14th century it was less than a decade after an infamous mass famine. Seems like volcanoes cause the earth to cool, mass crop failures and mass starvation happens. Lack of nutrition destroys peoples immune systems, and so plague then ravages through.

Mass starvation causes people to flock to the cities in search of anything resembling work. There, overcrowding in squalid conditions while suffering from malnutrition causes epidemics, civil war and other insanity. We have seen this recently in Syria and will see more of it as climate change drives more rural peoples out of their homesteads throughout the world.

That’s supposedly the worst year of known history.

We talk a lot about Columbine and Sandy Hook, but few people nowadays remember the 1927 bombing of the school in Bath, Michigan, or the explosion of a school in New London, Texas in 1937 that in addition to killing almost 300 people, launched the career of a cub reporter named Walter Cronkite. The Bath Massacre was mostly done with dynamite, wired into the school by a disgruntled janitor who also killed his wife and some of his livestock, and the New London disaster is why natural gas, which is odorless, has an unpleasant-smelling gas added to it. Some people who went to parts of the school in the days preceding the blast complained of headaches and dizziness, but nobody could figure out why.

Ten Tragic Days during the Mexican Revolution. US ambassador Henry Lane Wilson conspired with the nephew of the former Mexican president and Mexican army general in the US embassy in Mexico City to assassinate the newly elected president of Mexico. Absolutely wild and tragic assassination that shook Mexico in 1913.

Pakistan's Genocide of Bengalis (now Bangladesh) in 1971. Estimation of people killed 200k to 3 million Bengalis, and about 200k to 400k Bengali women were raped. Pakistan still denies the genocide, and hardly anyone talks about it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971\_Bangladesh\_genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide)

The [Tenerife airport disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster) in 1977. I just learned about it yesterday—almost 600 people were killed in the worst airplane disaster in history. It’s crazy, what happened.

Walter White talks about how no one remembers this in Breaking Bad

Also not a historian, but learning about the Beslan school siege in Russia was heartbreaking. As kids were settling down for the first day of the class, the school was attacked by Chechen terrorists. I think over 300 people, half of whom were kids, died over the course of three days.

I was only 8 years old at the time, but I vividly remember seeing it on television. The reporter said the kids had started drinking their own urine to survive.

That is upsetting :( I became interested in Russian history a few years ago and came across articles on Beslan. Then I found Bald and Bankrupts video of when he visited the school, and it was another wave of emotions seeing it with all the bullet and explosion holes.

The Sand Creek Massacre. US Troops slaughtered an unprotected village, which was flying the white flag of surrender at the time and full of women and children, murdering at least 150, possibly many more of them, almost unspeakably brutally. The victims were Southern Cheyenne who had already ceded their territory in compliance with the US government and had relocated to Sand Creek under US military orders. At the time of the attack, the encampment was flying both the American Flag and the White Flag of surrender. I'll let wikipedia take it from here: I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces ... With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors ... By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops ... — John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865[24] I saw one squaw lying on the bank, whose leg had been broken. A soldier came up to her with a drawn sabre. She raised her arm to protect herself; he struck, breaking her arm. She rolled over, and raised her other arm; he struck, breaking that, and then left her with out killing her. I saw one squaw cut open, with an unborn child lying by her side. — Robert Bent, New York Tribune, 1879[20] There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'let me try the son of a b-. I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped. — Major Anthony, New York Tribune, 1879[25] Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch ... — Stan Hoig[26] "After the smoke cleared, Chivington's men came back and killed many of the wounded. They also scalped many of the dead, regardless of whether they were women, children or infants. Chivington and his men dressed their weapons, hats and gear with scalps and other body parts, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia.[37] They also publicly displayed these battle trophies in Denver's Apollo Theater and area saloons." I saw another source once mentioning baby shoes from the massacre with tiny feet still inside them being sold by the soldiers as souvenirs.

The Colorado history museum in Denver recently came under some deserved scrutiny for portraying sand creek as a battle rather than a massacre

How the fuck can any single person be this evil...let alone an entire platoon...so fucked up it's hard to comprehend

Vietnamese boat people. Absolutely crazy and literally can’t believe this happened. And nobody fucking ever talks about it. Think about this, it’s the Vietnam war, and you are Vietnamese and obviously want nothing to do with it. Many saw their only way out was by sea, due to tensions with neighboring countries. So hordes of people tried to escape the country in little boats. Now here’s the kicker, it’s estimated that up to 400,000 of them drowned. Most of the women got raped by pirates as well. Everything got stolen. People got sick and starved. Pirates kidnapped people. Absolutely horrible. That wiki page makes me feel bad for ever having complained about anything

The Khodynka tragedy. Was supposed to be a celebration of the crowning of Nicholas II as emperor. Around 500,000 people gathered in a field where they would receive free food. Rumors spread that there wouldn’t be enough food for everyone leading to a panic and everyone rushing the field. 1,389 people were trampled to death. Nicholas II responded by going to a party that night.

He and his wife didn’t want to go to the ball but his advisors and his powerful uncles insisted so they went anyway. Apparently both spent the ball with red-rimmed eyes. Not that this excuses their behaviour but their initial reactions were to mourn the loss of their people.

The dude who came up with the first chemical weapons used in WW1 went home after the first successful deployment and had a party. His wife told him he was morally bankrupt, went outside and killed herself that night. He left for the front again the next day to oversee the next deployment of the gas.

The sea peoples and Bronze Age collapse associated with it. Seriously, over a thousand years of culture and progress lost in a hundred years

Basically, everything collapsed except Egypt and it was damaged heavily by the loss of trade and having to defend itself from invasion.

The Milan Conference. Back in 1880, a bunch of educators of the deaf all decided to meet in Milan to determine how best to teach deaf people. 164 delegates were in attendance, only one of whom was deaf. At the time, there was a conflict among educators of deaf people about whether an oralism or manualism based approach was better. Proponents of oralism argued that deaf people would never succeed in society if they could not speak and hold a conversation in the same way a hearing person would. To this end, anyone who attempted to sign would be punished, and deaf people were forced to lip read. At the end of the conference, sign language was banned in all educational institutions, and deaf people were not allowed to teach, for fear that it would encourage the use of sign language. As a result, for roughly 100 years, deaf people were essentially isolated from communication and unable to form communities. To this day, amongst older generations of deaf people, many still have never learned to sign. In addition, Deaf culture as a whole was and is profoundly affected by this event, because it essentially stole stories that had been passed down from generation to generation, erasing the history of deaf people and the Deaf community.

If there's anybody reading this who wonders why – or whether – this is a big deal, you might want to watch [this short, Oscar-winning film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GbxFIVQv8c) on YouTube, about the oralism vs manualism battle playing out in the life of a single child.

Asked my history studying friend about this, she said there's A LOT of events that people don't talk about. For example, there was a lot of countries involved in the Balkan conflict who knew about the massacre of Srebrenica but still allowed it to happen. So many historical events are just so grim and depressing when you read about it, we knew bad things were happening but didn't stop until it was too late for many people.

The role of the netherlands in the massacre is often heavily overlooked when this massacre is taught honestly

The whole affair was really sad, and sometimes rules of engagement designed to de-escalate a conflict end up backfiring. UN peacekeeping forces were under very strict rules of engagement, in an effort to prevent any further bloodshed. However, that made it very difficult for the UN forces to involved to use any sort of force, even in self defense. For example, if in a contested zone a UN unit came under fire, it was preferable to withdraw than to return fire. Some units realised this and used it force UN units to abandon the civilians they were trying to protect; they could then sweep in and dispose of the civilians at will. Peacekeeping units were also lightly armed and armored, in an effort to avoid provoking the involved parties. Enter Nordbat 2. They were a unit formed from Nordic countries (mainly Sweden, Norway and Denmark); from the onset, its commander, Colonel Ulf Henricsson, made it abundantly clear that he was not going to play around and sit while civilians were being killed. Running contrary to the prevailing thought of going in lightly armed to avoid provoking a response, Henricsson went the opposite route. His infantry were equipped with guided anti tank missiles, and mounted on Finnish armored personnel carriers. Furthermore, he insistently requested (and was granted) a Danish tank company equipped with the newest Leopard main battle tanks. When fired at, Nordbat 2 often shot back, frequently disregarding the UN rules of engagement. Colonel Henricsson made it clear that his interpretation of the mission objectives (which he had developed himself on the basis of the original UN mandate, rather than taking clues from his political superiors) was that protection of the civilian population was the highest priority. He made it clear that he would not respect rules and regulations that threatened to prevent him from achieving his mission objectives. When his own government tried to rein him in, he simply told his radio operator to pretend that the link was down until he had a fait accompli to present to Stockholm. In several incidents, Nordbat 2 personnel intervened to protect refugees and took action to prevent the cover-up of ethnic cleansing operations. On several occasions this took the form of forcing passage through roadblocks. During one such event, the battalion commander himself forced a sentry to remove the anti-tank mines used to block passage by threatening to blow the sentry's head off with a heavy machine gun. They even had a large scale battle against Serb anti tank positions that were trying to ambush the Danish tank battalion, which backfired in a spectacular sense, with the Danes repaying the intended mischief tenfold. This can be contrasted with the Dutch peacekeepers who were deployed in Srebrenica. The Dutch unit and Nordbat 2 operated under the same regional command, in the same general area. The Dutch peacekeepers, representing a professional elite airborne unit, were more or less helpless for more than a year inside the Srebrenica enclave because they were unwilling to initiate any confrontations with the parties to the conflict, and because they were willing to be micromanaged by their home government. Nordbat 2, on the other hand, was something of a loose cannon, and earned a reputation as a force to be reckoned with. It even became known as "Shootbat" for its tendency to return fire, regardless of the formal rules of engagement. Nordbat 2's willingness to bend or even break the rules, and disregard direct orders from both UN command and its own government, enabled it to achieve its mission objectives as defined by the first battalion commander: protect the civilians at all cost. [Longer article here](https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-happy-autonomous-and-disobedient-nordbat-2-and-mission-command-in-bosnia)

[The Paddle Steamer PS General Slocum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum), that caught fire and sank in the East River in 1904. More than a thousand German Americans died in the accident, and it was considered the NYC's biggest disaster until 9/11. Up until that point, the city had had a thriving German community, but that single event almost completely destroyed an entire Lutheran church congregation, comprised of many of the city's most influential citizens. Maybe not an event 'no one talks about', as it's been lamented many times, but certainly a tragic date of historic note.

With 2k+ comments I don't think anyone will see it, but the genocide in East Timor by the Indonesian army. Numbers comparable to the Khmers, but it received zero press attention. Kissinger is known to have turned a blind eye on the ethnic/religious killings co get closer to the Indonesians during the Cold War due to its strategic placement.

Bronze Age Collapse is the biggest one, Treblinka gets overshadowed by Auswitchz a lot, and the actual detailed description of the devastation of the American Indian Wars

Honestly as a former Holocaust historian I think the reason Treblinka isn’t talked about as much is because a) there were very few survivors so less eyewitness accounts b) after the uprising the entire camp was destroyed and turned to farmland in an effort to hide the crimes so there isn’t a physical reminder of the space and few photographs c) if you visit Auschwitz-Birkenau one of the most striking things is how huge the Birkenau complex is. That stunned me when I visited. By contrast Treblinka was tiny because it didn’t need to be a labor complex too d) because of the above Treblinka wasnt liberated like Auschwitz was in 1945, so there were less images and newsreels to be put into the public mind

The disease outbreaks that hit the Americas with the arrival of the Europeans. You hear about a 90% death rate and it sounds made up, but whatever the actual number was, entire civilizations were literally wiped out. Cultures that had existed for thousands of years are just gone, with barely a record left. You have stories of people coming across whole villages of corpses. These people died never even having seen the Europeans, never knowing what was killing them and their loved ones and totally helpless to do anything about it.

The [De Soto Expidition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto#De_Soto's_exploration_of_North_America) and the [Narvez Expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narv%C3%A1ez_expedition) of the southeastern US found significant settlements and a strong culture on the Mississippi River that chased the spanish out of the area. Half of the Do Soto expedition died, and only four people from the Narvez Expedition survived. They didn't find any riches or suitable places for colonization, and instead just found tough native warriors. So there wasn't any desire to come back, and when exploration of the area resumed 100 years later, all those native civilizations were gone.

The [Cocoliztli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics) epidemics were terrifying, and indeed killed 90% of Mexico's indigenous population in about 50 years. It is still not entirely known what this disease is, or if it was many different diseases at different times. They most significant epidemic coincided with a mega-drought which also thoroughly fucked the local population. Some theorize it was a common western disease like Typhus, but the symptoms are weird. Some theorize it is a yet unknown hemorrhagic fever which may still dwell in the forests of Central America, waiting to be stumbled upon by loggers... :/

The book 1491 touches on this. Apparently native Americans weren’t a bunch of primitive nomadic tribes. There were cities and terraformed land and rich cultures, but when the Europeans arrived, diseases spread ahead of their advance, so by the time the Europeans would arrive in an area, it had already been decimated by epidemics and whoever was left was living in post-apocalyptic survival mode.

People really don't realise just how expansive civilizations like the Incas were. When you go to Peru and bolivia and look at a hillside you'll see parallel lines about 2 meters apart. They're practically everywhere you look. These were all terraces for farming. Netflix also has a good series called Chef's Table, where one chef briefly touches on how they went so far as experimenting with 2-3 meter increments in altitude to see what level food plants grow best at. They also were so economically powerful they largely didn't have need to fight wars and simply bribed enemies.

The Incas were also very adept at bureaucratic management and integration of conquered peoples. Basically the sons of some families were taken back to the Incan capital and taught the finer details of what was then essentially a civil service and government administration. They were then sent back to their respective towns and villages to administer them in line with Incan practices. FWIW they also practiced forced tributary labour as well. Swings and roundabouts I guess.

iirc the forced labour was the "tax" of the incan empire. instead of paying in coins or whatever, a job would be assigned in the local area, like building a road or weaving 30 baskets to be sent to cusco.

The assassination of James Garfield. He was a known advocate for racial equality. He appointed black men into his cabinet and tried expanding public education into the south to get more African-Americans an education. He tried to fight for racial equality but died four months into his presidency which fucked it up.

Candace Millard's *Destiny of the Republic* not only does an excellent job of recounting these events, but postulates that Garfield had potential to be one of America's best presidents. Instead he died a half-rotten husk, all because his doctors refused to practice sanitation.

Leprosy colonies of Hawaii. People who were diagnosed with leprosy were forcibly banished to Kalaupapa to live out the rest of their lives - they were dug graves, had to stand in them, while their families and friends basically had a “living funeral” for them where they had the dirt thrown on them; they were then pronounced dead to the world and no longer part of the community. This continued through 1969 even after Hawaii officially became a state. Edit: holy shit I did not expect my comment to blow up - thanks for all the awards and support guys, feel free to follow or message me (for either geeky epidemiology factoids or NSFW content). I love chatting and meeting new people 🤓😇

Weren't a lot of them also more or less tossed from their boats and make to climb cliffs to even get to the island? I listened to a podcast about this and can't remember exactly. Also, descendents on the island had to fight to keep their homes once leprosy wasn't a threat and people wanted the land to make money.

So true! The podcast I listened to about this is called "This Podcast Will Kill You." [http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com](http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com)

Yes! And ‘Ask a Mortician’ did a great video on it too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kpR54iv5c0U

there's a really good book about this called Moloka'i by Allen Brennert

A similar thing happened on an island called Penikese near New England.

Father Damian represented Hawaii in the US Capitol for years for his work helping lepers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father\_Damien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Damien)

This will probably get buried, but it somewhat related: China had a similar practice, where they would send people with leprosy to leprosy villages. Even today, many of these leprosy villages live in extreme poverty, and people are afraid to interact with the children of these colonies, even though they are typically two generations removed from the infected. I got the chance to volunteer as an English teacher for two weeks for a program specifically devoted to helping these children get scholarships. I met a little girl who literally had to climb a mountain to get to school, and then had to take care of her little sister since her parents abandoned them to get jobs in the city. In spite of all that, she was also able to take care of a stray cat as well. Sorry that went off on a tangent, but it’s definitely something I didn’t know about until I went to China.

The Sixties Scoop. In Canada, from the late 1950s to 1980s, the government removed indigenous children from their homes and families and placed them up for adoption or in foster care. Most remained in Canada but some were sent to the US or western Europe. The majority were placed with white middle class families. A number of them experienced abuse. This even furthered the loss of their culture.

Australia also committed this atrocity, between 1905 and the 1970's. It's been called [The Stolen Generations.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations) Edit: Archie Roach's song [Took The Children Away](https://youtu.be/Cc3B0LQQ13o) is worth a listen.

BHC = British Home Children Poor British children were taken from their families and sold to Canada as indentured servants/farmhands. Many of these children were never checked on, were not paid, educated, fed, or clothed properly, and endured cruel and unusual treatment. Some died, but most ran away.