It was during the Lincoln administration in the middle of the Civil War that the first federal tax on income was levied by Congress, in the Internal Revenue Act of 1862.
The rates ranged from 3 to 5 percent. Congress eliminated the tax in 1872.
An American “Continental Navy” was established by the Second Continental Congress on October 13, 1775. It was disbanded after the War of Independence, in 1784. The first U.S. Navy was not established until April 30, 1798.
Abraham Lincoln was 25 when he was elected to the Illinois state legislature as an assemblyman in 1834.
The first woman formally nominated for the U.S. presidency was Belva Ann Lockwood (1830-1917), feminist and lawyer, who was nominated in 1884 and 1888 as the candidate of the National Equal Rights Party. An advocate of equal rights for women and international peace, Lockwood was also the first woman admitted to practice law before the…
In an 1889 speech, the 54-year old steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie outlined his “Gospel,” a set of principles for amassing and sharing wealth. He wrote, “The millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it…
Mary Quant, co-owner (with her husband Alexander Plunket Greene) of the boutique Bazaar in Chelsea, London, is credited with inventing the miniskirt. Quant, “the mother of the miniskirt,” premiered the new fashion item at Bazaar in 1965.
The “Hair Buyer of Detroit” was Henry Hamilton, the Detroit settlement’s British governor during the American Revolution. To fight the spread of U.S. settlements, he armed massive numbers of Native Americans with knives and ordered them to scalp frontier dwellers.