Getty1619 (PREDATES 1776)Establishment of slavery and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)Some respondents focused on the original sin of the slave trade, others on the infamous Supreme Court decision that called enslaved people property, but they were all saying the same thing: Slavery, while not a single “moment,” was our greatest shame.Getty1830–1850Indian removal/Trail of TearsThe forced removal and ethnic cleansing of some 60,000 Native Americans. Wrote one survivor: “Many days pass, and people die very much.” It was led by Andrew Jackson. Whose portrait now hangs in Donald Trump’s Oval Office.Getty1861Firing on Fort Sumter/the Civil WarLincoln had just been elected. South Carolina had just seceded and insisted that the U.S. Army abandon its military installations in the state. It refused. South Carolina’s militia attacked. The Civil War was underway.Getty1865Lincoln’s assassinationJohn Wilkes Booth vowed that a speech he heard Lincoln give on April 11 would be his last. And so it was. An act that felled our greatest president—and gave us one of the worst.Getty1877Compromise of 1877 ending ReconstructionThe political deal that ushered in the era of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws. Oh, and finagled the presidency away from the guy who got more votes. Sound familiar?Getty1921Tulsa MassacreTwo days of mob violence that destroyed 35 square blocks and left 10,000 Black people homeless. And it took seven decades for the state to form a commission to acknowledge and study it.Gety 1941Pearl HarborJapan attacked a naval base in Hawaii and ended America’s neutrality in World War II. The “date which will live in infamy,” in FDR’s famous phrase. His first draft? “A date which will live in world history.” Most important speech edit in history?Getty1942Japanese American internment in World War IIWithout question, FDR’s low point—120,000 Japanese Americans (80,000 of them citizens) sent to 10 camps. The Supreme Court defended this in 1944’s Korematsu v. United States, which has gone down in history as one of its worst decisions.Getty1945Dropping atomic weapons on JapanHarry Truman said he never lost a night’s sleep over the decision to drop the bombs that ultimately killed nearly 200,000 people. It did shorten the war—but it launched a dark and paranoid era in human history.Getty20019/11Three items on this list are not things the United States did, but things done to the United States. This one was awful: Four planes attacked the country, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. It was made even worse by our government’s overreaction.Getty2021January 6It’s still hard to believe that a sitting president led an insurrection against the United States of America and was at best indifferent to the idea of the mob killing his own vice president.Getty2024Reelection of Donald TrumpFuture historians will ask how the hell the American people decided to do this. Let’s just hope those historians are still living in a democracy.