Pocket Change Numismatic History
With a collection as large as the American Numismatic Society’s, those of us who work with it daily are bound to find something we are unfamiliar with. When this happens, we normally go to our colleagues first, and if they are equally stumped, a bit of internet sleuthing is usually enough to figure out what the gist of it is, and what additional resources are needed to dive deeper into it. But sometimes an object is so vexing, so perplexing, that even when knowing what it is and what the authoritative resources are, there doesn’t seem to be a logical…
Comedian and ANS member Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein, 1938
Recently I was leafing through an old Numismatist from the 1940s, looking for…
Today’s post comes from Jane Sancinito, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a specialist in…
I was talking with ANS fellow Scott Miller recently and mentioned to him an article I was working on about…
Some questions seem too obvious to be worth asking. Everyone knows that a mint is a production facility that strikes…
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…
Stephen Pell, painting by DeWitt M. Lockman
I don’t mean to turn this blog into my own personal travelogue, but I…