Coins

IN THE LATE 1850s, when coin collecting first became a national hobby, one of the more popular issues to collect was the early silver dollars, dating from 1794 through 1803. This interest has not flagged since that time and today the serious collector even has several specialized books to help understand the series. It all began more than 200 years ago. After 1783, when the United States achieved its formal independence from Great Britain, there was agitation to create a national coinage but the weak Confederation government was unable to do so because it had no money. It was not until after the Constitution of 1787, and the creation of the Federal government, that events slowly moved in this direction. In March 1790 Congress asked Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to prepare…

Three new bourse floor areas will be added for the convenience of collectors and dealers at the next Central States Numismatic Society (www.csns.org) convention in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, Ill., April 27-29, 2023. In addition to adding 100 tables to the regular bourse floor space, an entirely new area will be devoted specifically for lower-priced items, and there also will be another space devoted to merchants who are only doing wholesale dealer-to-dealer business. “The 2023 Central States show will offer more dealer-friendly and collector-friendly options and flexibility than have ever been provided by us or any other coin show in the past. Innovative new ideas are being introduced that create a wider array of options to help us do a better job of understanding and meeting the varied needs of our…

AS I’M writing this, Christmas is rapidly approaching. When that’s over, the New Year will be upon us. Among other things, the New Year reminds me of resolutions, the promise of changes we’ll make to improve our lives. Perhaps you’ll vow to finally start exercising or eating right or losing weight. Of course, these changes are interrelated. There may be other changes you desire that are unrelated. There may even be resolutions that you ought to make that you haven’t even considered. For example, do you have some coins? Do you consider yourself more of an accumulator of coins, or a collector of them? If the latter, where do you reside in the pantheon of collectors? That is, are you a beginner, middle-level collector, or an advanced collector, perhaps even a numismatist? From…

United States Mint Director Ventris C. Gibson on Nov. 10 accepted the 2022 Coin of the Year (COTY) Award for Most Historically Significant Coin for the 2020 Women’s Suffrage Centennial silver dollar from Peter H. Miller, president of Active Interest Media’s Home Group, which publishes World Coin News, Numismatic News, Coins magazine and Bank Note Reporter. The 2022 Coin of the Year program is presented by World Coin News and sponsored by the Journal of East Asian Numismatics. It honors coins dated 2020. The obverse of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial silver dollar features overlapping profiles of three distinct women. Each woman is wearing a different type of hat to symbolize the many decades the suffrage movement spanned. The figure in the foreground is wearing a cloche hat with an art deco pattern…

IN THE YEAR 2021, the United States Mint got just about every collector to sit up and take notice when they unveiled the 2021 Morgan and Peace dollars as centennial versions of the two classic series. The ever-present interest in the Morgan and Peace dollars went up a further notch and stayed there as the new versions were unveiled. To the chagrin of many in the collector community, the very next year the official word was that silver from suppliers to the Mint had been disrupted by the COVID pandemic, and there would be no Morgan and Peace dollars dated 2022. That announcement got many of us thinking that the 2021’s were going to be a one-hit wonder or the proverbial flash in the pan, and thus the dust settled…

Anew year means 12 months of new releases from the U.S. Mint, and the American Innovation dollar for the state of Ohio gets the honor of being the first issue of 2023, scheduled for Jan. 30. The subject of the Ohio dollar is the Underground Railroad, a decentralized network of individuals, families, friends and churches that covertly helped slaves escape to freedom. It was an innovation that arose as a convergence of several efforts to liberate slaves in the United States. The National Park Service recognizes over a dozen routes through Ohio that stand as monuments to fleeing slaves who made perilous journeys and those who helped them along their way. Other states abutting the South had active lines within the Underground Railroad network, but Ohio’s role in the Underground Railroad was…