Pocket Change
Collectively branded as Pocket Change, the ANS publishes new content frequently on its blog, in The Planchet podcast, as well as videos. Back-issues of ANS Magazine are also available.
ANS, 0000.999.16549
As Powerball mania sweeps the nation, I thought it would be interesting to explore the longer history of lotteries in America with a look back to the eighteenth century. For a run-down of the particulars about how they operated, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who served as the official Librarian of the United States, wrote a useful introduction to the subject you can read here. By way of a short summary, the practice of holding lotteries to raise money for local governments and private entities was brought by English colonists to North America in the seventeenth century. The Third Virginia Charter of 1612 granted the Virginia…
Detail of Morse from the reverse of an 1896 $2 silver certificate, ANS 1980.67.17
On January 6, 1838, American polymath Samuel…
The dawning of a new year has long been an occasion for celebration, but at least in numismatic terms, it…
I was casting about for a subject appropriate to the holiday season when I came across this coin:
ANS, 1943.132.4
And so I…
Micropasts is a web platform that hosts crowd-sourced collaborative research projects focused on archaeology, history, and heritage. The admirable goal of…
Last week Katherine Smoak, a graduate student in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, visited the ANS to…
Tyndale Bible at the Bodleian Library, Oxford
Every year at Christmas time, I seem to see mentions of the “poor widow’s…
With close to a million objects in the American Numismatic Society’s collections, the curatorial team occasionally comes across items that…
The American Numismatic Society has been chosen as one of ten publishers to participate in the Humanities Open Book project, a…
Orchard Street, ca. 1898Tenement Museum
The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side explores the history of immigration in New York City with a…
A combination of restrictive regulations and lack of available specie ensured that there was a persistent dearth of coinage in the…
View interactive issue
Collecting Coins and the Conflict in Syria by Ute Wartenberg Kagan
The Starosselsky Collection: Imperial Histories and Cultural Currencies…
The American Numismatic Society has launched a digital project that promises to be an important new research tool in ancient…