In Yankee Doodle's Pocket: The Myth, Magic and Politics of Money in Early America

In Yankee Doodle's Pocket offers fresh perspectives on America's celebrated ascent from disparate colonial outposts to sovereign power. Through the day-to-day instruments of trade and commerce, this book reveals teh myriad threads of cuulture and hidden history that together wove a new nation. Based on years of research, Will Nipper presents the associated facts, legends and theories in a conversational narrative that all audiences can read and appreciate.

In Yankee Doodle's Pocket links these everyday objects with the people, events, societies and upheavals that brought them into existence. The tale begins with the earliest European forays into the wilderness and ends with the 1840 dawning of America's industrial age. In the frontier beginning, barter monies sprang from fields, forests and oceans. In the end monotonously uniform coins and printed paper spewed from urban factories born of the Industrial Revolution. Until then, America's coins and paper currency were works of art, as beautiful in their simplicity and hand-crafted variation as their European counterparts were in sophisticated perfection.

By 1764, with the French finally ousted from meaningful presence in North America, Britain appeared to reign supreme -- Business as usual. However, revolutionary ideas and economic turmoil had been seething under the calm surface of colonial order for decades. Settling the issue required two more armed conflicts and an unprecedented, world-changing outpouring of reasoned discourse. By 1840, the change was complete. Throughout, trade goods, coinage and paper money helped communicate ideas, foster expansion and enable transformation. These objects reveal an America that was surprisingly cosmopolitan and commercial from the start. They helped communicate ideas, foster expansion and enable transformation. Showing their independence, enterprising individuals, colonies, then states, then the new federal governments themselves, conceived their own instruments of commerce. Every new issue proclaimed the symbols and ideals of the day.

As such, these artifacts were both witnesses to remarkable change and vital instruments of it. They tell of imperial and personal triumph - and folly. They celebrate our remarkable capacity for invention and adaptation. More importantly, they speak of the great American struggle between diversity and unanimity that was and remains a defining national principle. As we evolved from pluribus to something approaching unum, so did our money. This is the story of how it happened.
Binding: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Publication Date: 2008
Size: 8.5x11
Pages: 568