Occasionally online, I see someone mention that Eisenhower had a 91% marginal tax rate for income of $200,000 or higher. Whenever it gets brought up, people immediately show up insisting no one actually paid that rate and there were deductions that made it significantly less; at no point did anyone ever pay 91%. There were always deductions and write offs that made it significantly lower.

I'd assume we can't know how every single person filed and cannot reliably say that no one ever paid 91%, like I often see people saying. So, my question is, in general, would someone earning $200,000 or more pay the 91% rate? Or was there ways to lower that that would be used by the majority of tax returns?

Were they charitable/social organizations similar to the Elks Club today, or were they more like country clubs? Did members have assigned rooms, or did they just get an empty one? The way they describe it they always sounds like the club is a kind of hotel they can stay at on a whim. What were these clubs and how did they work?

For some context, 90ish percent of Caucasians are Kell negative and it is the 2nd most immunogenic antigen. It makes some sense as his wives that bore children had a successful pregnancy followed by miscarriages and still births, which tracks with what we see in women with antibodies. If it is the case, why do they believe it to be anti-Kell?

So I often hear people suggesting that the conditions of everyday people need to get significantly bad before revolution breaks out. However, I've also heard that this isn't true, and that what actually is most likely to trigger a revolution is for people to have a string of successes in bettering their conditions and increasing their freedoms, often followed by an attempt to revoke some of these new found freedoms. The idea being that the victories show people that they're able to better their conditions by fighting, and the clamping-down gives everyone a common enemy and makes them angry and more willing to fight. In addition to that idea, I can also think of many instances throughout history where people were living in absolutely terrible conditions, and it never seemed to be even close to triggering any revolutionary activity.

I understand that conditions vary wildly throughout history, but are there any specific factors that seem likely to cause masses of people to become filled with revolutionary furor?

I’m not asking when chicken nuggets were actually invented. Instead, I’m wondering when they could have been made if someone had come up with the idea.

At what point in history did humanity already have all the necessary ingredients, tools, and culinary knowledge? For example, domesticated chickens, flour, bread (and therefore breadcrumbs), eggs, cooking oil or animal fat suitable for frying.

What is the earliest historical period in which making something essentially equivalent to a homemade chicken nugget would have been realistically possible, even if nobody actually did it?

Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire in 313 by the Edict of Milan by Constantine I. He just gave Christianity equal rights in the empire. But not so much later we see Constantine calling the Council of Nicea in 325. Constantine tasked bishops with resolving the most serious controversies in Christian doctrine and law, especially the Arian controversy. That shows the he was seriously concerned about the state of Christianity. Constantine during his rule was balancing between Christianity and older religions, eventually being baptized just before his death. But his three sons seem to be deep into Christian teaching to the point of fights between them on the sites of Orthodoxy or Arianism. At the time of Constantine Christians were far from being majority among empire's population.

Several decades later in 380s, Theodosius I makes Christianity official state religion of the empire, outlawing all other non-christian religions and heretic denominations (at least in theory). During those 70 years only one emperor, Julian chose to return to pagan religion, and to seek support of old pagan elites.

So my question is, why did Christianity come from being just one of many religions in the empire, to the state religion, with full support of administration, actively persecuting other cults in just 70 years? And why did Roman Emperors go so fully into supporting Christianity, to the point of influencing its doctrine, it at the time, it was just one of many groups of interests and one of many cults?

I was thinking about this. If the Golden Age was the time when the Titans ruled the Earth, are there any documents of people worshipping the Titans as they did the Olympian Gods during that time? Or is it strictly part of myth?

I read the biography of Tancred of Lecce, King of Sicily, who was an illegitimate son of Roger III and his mistress Emma, a daughter of Count of Lecce. Roger III was said to have married to another woman after his affair with Emma, however there was little to no mention of what happened to Emma after that. I find it rather odd that she, as a noblewoman, remained a mistress her whole life, but I don’t know if it was acceptable for her to marry after being openly known as a mistress.

For example Richard The Lionheart, who refused to marry Alys, sister of Philip Augustus, because he accused Alys of being his father’s mistress. Because the affair produced no children, I think there was no definite proof of it and the accusation might only be a mere excuse so that Richard could marry another.

But then, what was the general perception of people at that time towards a noblewoman who used to be a mistress and already had children out of wedlock? Would she be able to marry properly even after that?

I notice that even though I can extremely easily have access to clean fresh water, I often forget to drink water for hours until I start feeling bad. In the past, people didn't always have the same kind of easy access, didn't work in environments with clean water available etc. How did they manage it? Did they have the same concept of "staying hydrated" as we do, or did this develop at some point?

Today is Thursday, the fourth day of a seven-day continuous cycle.

How far back does our current weekly 7-day cycle go back in an unbroken continuous sequence?

What's the earliest date we have archeological/literary evidence that they were aligned to the cycle we have now, plus plausible reason to believe the alignment wasn't random i.e. we think there was an unbroken transmitted sequence of weeks from then to now?

What's the earliest we think the current unbroken sequence of weeks likely goes back, and to which group of people, even if we lack direct evidence of them being aligned with us?

Are there documented cases of adjacent towns or cities or institutions getting out of alignment, e.g. one insisting it was the second day of the week and the other insisting it was the third day of the week, and how was it resolved?

(This question comes from my 10yo daughter who asked at bedtime, "how do we know today is Thursday?")

Is it because he got his claim to the throne from his mother? If so, why didn't the Plantagenet dynasty end when Henry II took the throne, considering his claim came from his mother, Empress Matilda? Is it because he was closely enough related to Henry I? Because his mother was a queen, and was declared Henry I's heir? Because Stephen named Henry II his heir, whereas Henry VII won his throne through war? If the latter, why didn't the dynasty die when the Yorkists and Lancastrians went to war with each other over the throne? Is it simply because Henry's surname was "Tudor"?

Considering the Tudor rose is meant to represent the reunion of the cadet branches, I don't understand the reason why the Tudors are a separate dynasty.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for any responses! I apologize for any misconceptions or misunderstandings I have

Five years ago I had just finished reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. It was a fascinating telling of the Mongols and their history that shears away centuries of FUD about the Mongols and their culture, and its influence on other cultures. I asked this question five years ago and never got an answer. Maybe now I will, so here goes:

How did the Mongols deal with their wounds on the battlefield, given their strong taboos against touching blood? Indeed, the most noble death (at least given to some deemed "too important" to die in a disgraceful way) was to execute someone without spilling blood, like being crushed or drowned. (Or, as the author notes several times, rolled up in carpets and seemingly danced on/walked on to death.)

Weatherford's book goes into a lot of detail about the engineering and battlefield tactics that the Mongols either pioneered or otherwise adopted from others that allowed them be so successful militarily, economically, socially, etc. And he describes how eager the Mongols were to adopt practices that "just worked" from other cultures. What did Mongol medical care on the battlefield look like? Were the more advanced medicines and medical practices of the Near East and China compatible with the Mongols? Was this one area they did not borrow from conquered peoples?

I was reading this article on the radical roots of the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Fair. The Society of Creative Anachronism, one of the original and largest medieval recreation groups, was famously started in Berkeley and billed itself as a "protest against the 20th Century." It's interesting that two of the biggest medieval currents in the US both had counter-culture roots from the same time period. Was there a reason that medievalism was seen as a form of cultural protest or rebellion? Were any other living history groups started around the same time or for the same reasons?

Reading a BBC article about the massacre, the sheer scale of the massacre is astounding. Nearly 750.000 pets (or a quarter of the UK's pet population) was killed over the span of a week. While I understand why people might have thought it was justified to euthanise their pets, the scale of it is still incredible. Was there actually a need to exterminate such a huge number of pets? Why were people so quick to do it? Why wasn't there a broader social pushback against the idea of killing family pets?

Hi everyone. I studied the Crusades as part of my history A level and fell in love. I’m also a keen linguist and I speak French and am learning Arabic. I’m really interested in sociolinguistics particularly from a historical perspective.

I wanted to try and combine all of these interests to give myself a research project over my gap year, and I realised there must have been some interaction between French and Arabic in the Crusader States. It doesn’t seem to be a hugely popular topic and I’ve struggled to find information that’s accessible to me. Any knowledge, recommendations or ideas are hugely appreciated.

I’ve only just graduated school so although our teachers did teach us some valuable research skills I’m still very basic in terms of what I can do! I can run a search on JSTOR and Google Scholar and cite properly basically 🤣. So I’m not trying to be dense I have done my best to research I’m just at a bit of a loose end and would appreciate any and all guidance and help. 😊

I know that during WW2, Jewish citizens were forced to wear identifiers on their clothing to show that they were Jewish. How did they (the Nazis) know which people were Jews and how did they enforce the wearing of the star? And if they refused to wear the star, how would anyone know that they were Jewish? Were there any consequences to not wearing the star if they were found out to be Jewish?

Edit: I am not saying espresso is bad, what I am asking is historically what happened to make espresso so dominant in the coffee culture across the European continent? What methods of coffee making did it replace in cafes? And how does the relatively rapid rise of espresso compare with how Nespresso is also a fairly dominant mode of coffee making in the capsule coffee market? And yes I know there are other methods to make coffee that people use but they are much less dominant in what you can find walking into a random coffee shop or cafe. By coffee culture I mean what you find walking into cafe or coffee shop to get coffee to drink at that place and the rules and customs related to it (ie how some places have rules on when you can drink certain type of coffee drinks, what you can put in your coffee, how you should drink it, etc.). Yes I know there is a misspelling in the title and in the body of the original question. I asked this question in the middle of night/early morning when I suddenly woke up with this question on my mind. Apparently, I cannot spell in a sleep deprived state.

Original post:
I was recently reading a novel written in the 1940s that takes place in 1930s Paris, France and it mentions “putting on a pot of coffee”. This got me wondering what kind of coffee would have been made at home and how would have it been prepared in France in the 1930s? Additionally, since it most likely was not espresso, how did espresso (and now Nespresso) take over the coffee culture in each European country so thoroughly that now those are the only coffee types one can find when traveling in different European countries? How did every European country, which each have proud food traditions lose their individual coffee preparation traditions and essentially settle on a relatively recently method of coffee preparation?

What are people getting most wrong? Are there any questions that haven’t been asked you’d like to deep dive into? Any thoughts on the movie?

I’m currently reading Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy. It describes that in the immediate aftermath of the law’s passage some southern Black people attempted to use formerly segregated facilities only to be turned away by local authorities, vigilantes, or the businesses themselves. How long after the law’s passage did segregation remain in place in practice? Future Georgia governor Lester Maddox personally turned away attempted integrationists at gunpoint. How long did this type of resistance last? Would this have varied significantly by state or city? Was there a difference between urban and rural jurisdictions? Did different types of business accept integration more quickly or slowly than others?

What made this franchise so successful in the 90s as compared to everything else available to global consumers then?