Shockingly, Hitler and World War II didn't help things. The Silver Shirts, a pro-Nazi group originally shat out of North Carolina, had one of its largest chapters in Minneapolis, thanks to the anti-Jewish sentiment in the city. One of their meetings there was attended by a member of the Minneapolis School Board and the president of the Associated Industries of Minneapolis. Mind you, this wasn't your average fascist get-together -- these guys believed the Pyramids of Giza predicted a Jewish world-conquering conspiracy. In the end, it took a combination of teamsters and gangsters to kick the group out of the city ... presumably by giving them wedgies, because check out how these losers dressed:

via netteandme.blogspot.com

Even after America thumped the Axis Powers, Minneapolis still saw itself labeled in 1946 as "the capital of antisemitism in the United States." Eventually, they got their shit together, presumably when they realized that wasn't the best motto for a city.

The Disturbing History:

Everything we just mentioned was originally shaped by fucked-up situations.

It's hard to know where to start, so let's be a little touristy for a bit and take a ride on the London Underground. As we head out on the Piccadilly line east to South Kensington, the train takes a bit of a turn before getting back onto straighter track -- because otherwise, we'd crash into an ancient pile of corpses. When the London Underground's builders reached Hyde Park, they discovered a present the plague had left them a few centuries prior: a mass grave densely filled with interlocking skeletons, like the world's worst game of Tetris. It was packed so tightly that it was borderline impossible to drill into. They're still bumping into piles of corpses today.

Lion TV

Moving along, we'll hop off the train at Big Ben. Most people know it by the big-ass clock tower, but it's connected to the Palace of Westminster, home of Britain's parliament ... which is notoriously more like a frat party than a functional system of government. The buildings themselves reflect that: Inside an area connecting Big Ben and the House of Commons is a section previously known as the Prison Room, where Ministers of Parliament were thrown when they were too rowdy even for Parliament. Think of it as a drunk tank for lawmakers. Others were locked in there for crimes like refusing to swear allegiance to the Queen or thinking that women should vote.

Those people got off lucky, though. A few centuries earlier, traitors to the crown were taken to London Bridge. Like this:

via hankwhittemore.wordpress.com

Don't see them? Let's zoom in on that front section:

via british-history.ac.uk

Yep, in its medieval version, the Bridge was decorated with the heads of those who pissed off Her Majesty, stuck on pikes. Hopefully, Simon Cowell isn't reading this, or we've given him an idea for what to do to the losers on The X Factor.

Napoleon III was well aware that he needed some sense of order to his rule, and he couldn't risk being seen as the war hawk ol' uncle had been. He decided to team up with a sneaky guy named Baron Haussman to pull a win-win for the city of Paris. They needed a convenient way to squash any potential rebellions, while also looking like they were doing something productive with taxpayer money. The solution: road design. Insidious road design.

While "repairing" roads under the guise of cleaning up the streets, they implemented designs and cut major boulevards that would prevent street barricades and makeshift forts in the middle of the roads.

Horace Vernet

Charles Marville

Say what you will about Parisian manners, they once had a leader who wanted to prevent traffic about a hundred years prior to the invention of the automobile.

The Disturbing History:

Or, you know, the goddamn plague. In 1900, the bubonic plague hit San Francisco via a steamship carrying infected rats. When a lumber salesman named Wong Chut King fell sick and died, the authorities decided that the whole thing must be the Chinese's fault and immediately quarantined Chinatown.

The San Francisco Call

Whites were escorted out of the area, while Chinese citizens were forced to stay there, under the bogus belief that their race made them more susceptible to the disease. In an effort to make things go back to normal, the Chinese residents of Chinatown began hiding and smuggling out their dead.

San Francisco Examiner

Five years and 100 deaths later, it seemed that the plague was over and done with ... but it roared back with a vengeance in 1907, this time taking mostly white victims. Because San Francisco dealt with an enormous earthquake just a year prior, rats carrying the plague were no longer confined just to Chinatown, and the government freaked the hell out. At least somewhat in part due to the efforts by local and state officials to silence doctors and aid workers who were only trying to help, it took years before the plague was finally eradicated in northern California. It was replaced decades later by the far less fatal but nonetheless virulent "tech douche" pandemic.

Well, those kids are trying to bone each other right on top of actual bones -- the New York Parks Department estimates that there are nearly 20,000 bodies buried under the Washington Square Park, from back when this same place was a public burial ground for the homeless, the destitute, and the criminal. So yeah, it turns out that the J.J. Abrams show that depicts the most dead people isn't Lost or Alias -- it's Felicity.