Human beings are an ever-evolving species. Once, we carried spears and created fantastic works of art on the walls of French caves. Today, we carry smartphones and trip over things because we don't ever look where we're going. Yes, the human species gets better and better all the time.
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Since the Industrial Revolution, things have changed at such a blindingly fast pace that we sometimes forget just how weird the world used to be. (Because it's not at all weird anymore, right?) Things that were once commonplace seem strange or even bizarre today, although it's probably also true that humans who lived 100 years ago would think the things we do are pretty strange and bizarre. Sadly, we don't have any way to actually show an early 20th-century person a YouTube video of someone eating a Tide Pod. But we can at least enjoy our own bemusement at the strange and bizarre habits of our recent ancestors, mostly because it's okay to make fun of people who have been dead for decades.
This sounds like the plot of post-apocalyptic fiction but sadly, it's actually pre-apocalyptic non-fiction. One hundred years ago, in many big cities in the United States, it was illegal to be ugly.
Let's take Chicago as an example. According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1881, Alderman James Peevey decided he'd had enough of the eyeball-assaulting horrors of other people's misfortune, so he introduced an ordinance to ban people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" from the streets of Chicago, where they might make people uncomfortable. If you were deemed too ugly to be in public, you had to pay a fine of $1 to $50 (which was a decent sum in those days) or go to the poorhouse, which was kind of like an insane asylum for poor people.
After World War I, when veterans returned home with missing limbs and other disfiguring battle scars, public opinion toward the disabled started to change, but ugly laws remained on the books and their enforcement continued up until the 1950s. Chicago's ugly law wasn't officially dropped until 1974.
Now we'd love to say we're way more enlightened today but fat-shaming is still a thing, so collective enlightenment is perhaps still forthcoming. But at least fat-shaming isn't written into law.
Before there was Halloween there was Thanksgiving. No, really. People used to dress up in costumes, run around the city streets making noise, and go to costume parties. On Thanksgiving.
According to NPR, the tradition was so well loved that in 1897 the LA Times reported that Thanksgiving was "the busiest time of the year for manufacturers of and dealers in masks and false faces." And if that isn't enough to make your head spin, costumed kids would also march in troops around their neighborhoods and ask adults "Anything for Thanksgiving?" And then the adults would give them candy. Oh-kay.
The custom bothered a lot of people. In fact, New York's school superintendent, who was almost certainly related to the guy who came up with the whole ugly law thing, complained that the tradition seemed designed to mostly just "annoy adults" and was incompatible with "modernity." Anyway, it might surprise you to hear that this particular Thanksgiving tradition is sort of still around, only now you mostly only see elaborate Thanksgiving costumes in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Kids really didn't want to give up the whole candy-getting thing, though, and by the 1930s the practice of going door to door in search of treats became a Halloween tradition, although it was mostly an organized event meant to curtail Halloween vandalism and violence — hence the expression "trick or treat."