Pocket Change Numismatic History
Some questions seem too obvious to be worth asking. Everyone knows that a mint is a production facility that strikes coins. But wait—are facilities that produce tokens or medals included? Is it really the facility at all, or rather the organization that operates it? Or even the organization that controls how coins are issued? All of these possibilities occur in numismatic usage, and they aren’t always the same.
Before modern machinery, minting of coins did not require much infrastructure. Considered on its own, the striking process only requires a pair of dies, a hammer, and a supply of blanks, plus a…
Heath’s microscope and one of his counterfeit detectors.
The ANS Library and Archives recently acquired an interesting little gadget—one of Laban…
Charles Ira Bushnell
A couple of months ago, friend and fellow numismatic researcher Joel Orosz sent me a news clipping containing…
by Ellen Nye and David Yoon
In August 2018, as Turkey faced a currency crisis, its president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called…
As one of the leading international centers of numismatic research, it’s no surprise that the stories coins tell about the…
There are many ways to describe where a coin is from. One by reference to the place of minting (e.g.,…
Since ancient times, justice has been one of the fundamental concepts of civilized society. Through the centuries its allegorical personification…
Steven Pell, painting by DeWitt M. Lockman
I don’t mean to turn this blog into my own personal travelogue, but I…
The Franc is one of the oldest and most widespread currency units in the world, currently the official currency of…
The many treasures of the American Numismatic Society’s archives include not only the Society’s own history and papers documenting the…
Guest post by David D. Gladfelter. David studies, writes, and speaks about the history of bank note engraving and printing,…
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at a meeting of the New York Numismatic Club (NYNC) on the…