Pocket Change Blog

Last week, the ANS was visited by Dr. Chad Leahy, an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Early Modern Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Denver. Chad was kind enough to sit for a short interview about his work, and what follows is a lightly edited transcript of our talk.

What brings you to the ANS today?

I am working on a book project right now about the representation of Jerusalem in early modern Spanish culture and how the politics and interests of Spain in the Holy Land were refracted in art and literature. I also am finishing…

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the Bank of Brest, one of the multitude of wildcat banks that…

The 2015 edition of the Eric P. Newman Graduate Seminar in Numismatics started this week at the American Numismatic Society. The seminar…

Sutlers were civilian merchants who supplied the Union Army with non-military goods that the government did not provide for the troops….

With close to a million objects in the American Numismatic Society’s collections, the curatorial team occasionally comes across items that…

Scattered among the American Numismatic Society’s paper money collection are vignette proofs, which are small engravings mounted on card stock by printing…

This week in 1925, Charles Lindbergh completed the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in his custom-built plane the Spirit of…

Last week the ANS was visited by Katherine van Schaik, an M.D. and Ph.D. student at Harvard University. Katherine was kind…

The Bank of Brest in Michigan was one of the most infamous “wildcat” banks that sprang up amidst the more…

With Mother’s Day approaching this weekend, I thought it might be a good time for a post about the many…

With close to a million objects in the American Numismatic Society’s collections, the curatorial team occasionally comes across items that…

The introduction of the ‘greenback’ in 1861 marked a turning point in the history of American currency. Greenback was the colloquial…