Greenback, Jason Goodwin, Penguin Books, Limited, 2003, , . .

DOWNLOAD http://kgarch.org/1cksQ4A

The Greenback Paper Money and American Culture, Heinz Tschachler, Apr 5, 2010, Antiques & Collectibles, 248 pages. "This text explores the social, cultural and historical contexts of paper money. Predicated on the assumption that paper bills speak to us through the use of symbols--letters ....

A guide book of modern United States currency , Neil Shafer, 1973, , 160 pages. .

Alexander Hamilton Federalist and Founding Father, Lisa DeCarolis, Jan 1, 2003, Juvenile Nonfiction, 112 pages. Surveys the life of Alexander Hamilton, a founding father, later becoming the first Secretary of the Treasury..

American Heritage , , 1960, Art, . .

The History of Money , Jack Weatherford, Sep 23, 2009, Business & Economics, 304 pages. In his most widely appealing book yet, one of today's leading authors of popular anthropology looks at the intriguing history and peculiar nature of money, tracing our ....

Alexander Hamilton in the American tradition , Louis Morton Hacker, 1957, , 273 pages. .

History at your fingertips and spirit of the nation , Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1996, Antiques & Collectibles, 8 pages. .

The Official 2003 Blackbook Price Guide to United States Paper Money, 35th Edition , Marc Hudgeons, Thomas E. Hudgeons, Jul 2, 2002, Antiques & Collectibles, 336 pages. The 36th edition of this essential guide is still the most comprehensive source for collecting and pricing U.S. paper currency. It covers every national note issued from the ....

Alexander Hamilton , Stuart Gerry Brown, 1967, , 183 pages. .

The official guide of United States paper money , Theodore Kemm, 1974, Antiques & Collectibles, 192 pages. .

The new deal in money , Charles Edward Coughlin, 1933, Business & Economics, 128 pages. .

The Janissary Tree , Jason Goodwin, , , . .

The Great Seal of the United States , , , , . .

The Everything Founding Fathers Book All you need to know about the men who shaped America, Meg Greene, Paula Stathakis, Jun 18, 2011, History, 304 pages. George Washington. John Adams. Benjamin Franklin. These great leaders--and many others--made innumerable contributions that laid the groundwork for our nation. But who were ....

The Cash Nexus Money and Politics in Modern History, 1700-2000, Niall Ferguson, Mar 7, 2013, History, 576 pages. The Cash Nexus is the controversial history of money's central place in the world, from Niall Ferguson, bestselling author of Empire and Civilization Generations of historians ....

From the author of Lords of the Horizons, the fascinating story of a new kind of money for a new world. Money has always been at the heart of the American experience. Paper money itself, invented in Boston in 1698, was a classic of American ingenuity—and American disregard for authority and tradition. With the wry and admiring eye of a modern De Tocqueville, Jason Goodwin has written a biography of the dollar giving us the story of its astonishing career through the wilds of American history.

Greenback looks at the dollar over the years as a form of art, a kind of advertising, a reflection of American attitudes, and a builder of empires. Goodwin shows us how the dollar rolled out the frontier, peopled the Plains; how it erected the great cities; how it expressed the urges of democracy and opportunity. And above all, he introduces us to the people who championed—or ambushed—the dollar over the years: presidents, artists, pioneers and frontiersmen, bankers shady and upright, safe-blowers, and crooks and dreamers of every stripe. It’s a vast and colorful cast of characters, all agreed on one thing: getting the money right was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Greenback delves into folklore and the development of printing, investigates wildcats and counterfeiters, explains why a buck is a buck and how Dixie got its name. Like Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons, another story of empire, Greenback brings an array of quirky detail and surprising—often hilarious—anecdote to tell the story of America through its best-beloved product.

After a strong start, this history of American money loses its thread and ends up as an entertaining collection of trivia, personality profiles and vignettes rather than the compelling narrative promised in its opening. Still, Goodwin's flair for a colorful tale makes for rich reading, covering such odds and ends as a brothel in the Treasury Department, a prayer vigil over banking deposits, exploding printing presses and even a counterfeit scheme run from behind prison bars. Goodwin (Lords of the Horizons) makes some excellent points about the role of paper money in early U.S. history-it was the earliest symbol of the new country; it helped push colonists West; it even helped familiarize Americans with their native artists-but the significance of the stories he's chosen to include isn't always clear. After presenting a single national currency as one of the holy grails of early American banking, for instance, he glosses over the moment it finally arrives, a true turning point in American financial history. Goodwin's position as a foreign observer (he is an English journalist) occasionally trips him up: no one in America, for example, says "that will be four dollars thirty six." The cast of characters is as colorful as they come, and in the end the book makes good reading for those interested in odd and exciting tales from American financial history. But it's not the fascinating narrative take on the history of money in America that Goodwin sets out to deliver, and which the subject deserves. 30 b&w illus.

Goodwin tells the story of the world's dominant currency, the dollar, and its astonishing role in American history. We learn about the endless list of characters who shaped this country, both famous and obscure, and how they profoundly influenced its growth because they understood that money was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness or wealth. Paper money, invented in Boston in 1698, was known as "bills of credit," which people could use now and pay for in years ahead. Unlike Europeans, who were attached to money for its own sake, Americans used it as a medium for growth with an entrepreneurial spirit that has flowered in this country during the more than 300 years since the dollar was invented. Goodwin reports, "America's theology was a secular one. It revolved around money and liberty, promise and return, profit and loss. It revolved, in fact, around the miracle of money." Mary Whaley

At a simple level why should we give something valuable - say a week's work - in exchange for a piece of paper? Of course, today's money is guaranteed by the U.S. government, a reliable organization. This wasn't the case for most of U.S. history. In, say 1840, you might receive an impressive certificate for ten dollars - payable in specie ("real money," i.e. coin) at Fred's bank in Lexington, Kentucky. If you lived in Lexington and knew Fred was reliable this was acceptable. Living fifty miles away in Louisville, you might not feel so comfortable. You might insist on a few extra of Fred's dollars to compensate for the risk. Far away in New York, who knew about Fred? His dollars might be worthless or accepted at a big discount.

What a mess! In fact, state regulation existed, but it was not rigorous. Readers will chuckle as Goodwin explains how bankers in a given city would assemble a chest of hard money. On the arrival of a state inspector checking that each bank had enough specie to cover its notes, the chest would be rushed from bank to bank just ahead of the inspector. The Civil War finally forced the U.S. to issue paper money, but this was regarded as an emergency measure, and for decades afterward "greenbacks" were looked upon with deep suspicion.

Switching gears, the author discusses counterfeiting. Until the nineteenth century, paper was printed with copper plates. Copper is soft, and after five thousand impressions, the plate wore out. It had to be re-engraved. This never produced the identical image, so even good bank notes showed variations which made counterfeiting a snap. The author introduces Jacob Perkins, an American genius unknown to me and most of you. Just after 1800 he invented steel engraving. This made duplicating a bill much harder, but the book collects a dozen fascinating counterfeiting capers with an explanation of the technology behind them.

Galbraith's Money is fun to read and well organized. Goodwin's Greenback is even more fun. Well organized it isn't, but in chapter after chapter he tells wonderful stories about Americans and their attitude to paper money (Jefferson and Jackson hated it; Franklin and Hamilton loved it). We forget that gold and silver coin were scarce in the U.S. until late in the nineteenth century, so even people with a moral objection were forced to use paper money.<... Read more ›

His interpretation of American history is terrible. Just a few examples: Early in the book he cited Hawthorne, Thoreau and Twain (who lost a fortune trying to be an industrialist) to reach the conclusion that Americans did not collect and hoard money in the nineteenth century. Apparently he did not read the rest of his book which went on ad nauseum about Americans in the nineteenth century chasing and counterfeiting the dollar. In another instance he concludes that all civil rights were suspended during the civil war (not that this had anything to do with $) - completely ignoring the fact that the Supreme Court overturned Lincoln's attempt to suspend habeas corpus. Lastly (I could go on and on), he finished the book by noting that on our dollar bills are the icons that were present at the birth of our nation. This, after telling how Grant and Cleveland were on our bills! Last I looked they lived late in the next century.

Jason Goodwin is a polarizing author, whose books are either hated or loved by his readers. As in his best-known previous book, "Lords of the Horizons", in "Greenback" he uses a lot of wonderful anecdotes to spice up his prose and keep the reader interested. As in that book, his grasp of the essence of the subject is pretty good, although one could disagree in the details.

I am one of those readers who choose to stay away from rigorous, traditional history books because I am turned off by the stuffiness and the pedantic detailed narrative that they often provide. (I came to this end after having read a good deal of them...) I believe that the history of any subject is the sum of the personal histories of the people who participated and formed those events, famous or obscure, big or small. Jason Goodwin gives us plenty of those little personal stories and thank God for that as far as I am concerned.

I found this book very enjoyable to read and rich in information, although not as exciting as "Lords of the Horizons", so I am giving it 4 stars instead of the 5 I gave that one. I hope Jason Goodwin keeps giving us those great books on his diverse subjects and full of those colorful characters, and I am looking forward to his next book of non-sterilized history.

This book was my first introduction to the history of paper currency. I haven't found many books with an emphasis on the evolution of currency, and subsequently I found this book to be a unique gem. I was drawn into the story of the financial perspective of the early American culture. I enjoyed the stories of settlers who counterfeited bills and how people would try to outrun the devaluation of the currency. It is very interesting to see the origins of money and what brought about the creation of artificial currencies like paper and electronic money. I'm very glad that I read this book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading about the American Greenback.

Those who doubt that America is a remarkably conservative nation can reflect on the fact that the appearance of its primary unit of currency, the dollar bill, has hardly changed since 1929: the only additions were the Great Seal - that sinister pyramid with a blazing eye at the apex - in 1935, and the words "In God We Trust" in 1956, at the height of the cold war. If you find a 150-year-old dollar bill, it will still be legal tender. This is particularly poignant for nostalgic Britons who find themselves mourning the loss of all kinds of paper specie in the name of modernisation.

The identity of the US is very much bound up with the dollar, and the idea of telling the history of one through the history of the other is simple and brilliant. It could also be somewhat dull in execution, to put it mildly. There is going to have to be rather a lot of financial information in there, elucidations of first principles, plausible and sufficient accounts of political wranglings over bimetallism and the Gold Standard.

So it is just as well that it is Jason Goodwin who has written this book, for he would appear to have a congenital antipathy towards the production of tedious prose. I still recall a striking digression from his first book, On Foot to the Golden Horn, an account of his journey across Europe to Istanbul, in which he informed us that his sister had once told him that he was going to die, because his pee smelled inexplicably of Sugar Puffs. I have been a fan ever since. Here is his gloss on the argument between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton about the issuing of paper money: "But Jefferson's dream of a rural republic where people used money like match sticks in a friendly game of poker was never really very plausible. Money won't be confined. It runs into the street. Money likes making friends. Money can't bear to be idle, can't keep to itself, can't help but chase after the latest fad or the hottest show. Fickle as love, it will gladly promise itself to anyone. Money's curious, prying, venturesome, and unforgiving: you can't lock money up when the sound of the band wafts through the grille."

You will learn some fascinating stuff from this book. The Great Seal may not have made it on to the bill until 1935, but the pyramid was on early "Continental" bills issued to pay for the American revolution. Silver dollars would be chiselled into fragments to provide change - hence pieces of eight, quarters, two-bits. The motto "E Pluribus Unum" does not come from any classical author but from a London magazine, which eventually metamorphosed into GQ. The very valley from which the word "dollar" is derived ("thal" = valley; a thaler was made of quality silver mined from Joachimsthal) was where Marie Curie, and later the Nazis, found the ores from which radium could be isolated. The South is called Dixie because of the bilingual $10 bills issued in Louisiana - "Dix" pronounced anglophonically. And so on. (The counterfeiting stories alone are hugely entertaining.)

While the bulk of the book deals with the 18th and 19th centuries, you very much get the impression that, unlike Europe, America is an ongoing project, a matter of progress rather than stability. Certainly this history reminds us how chaotic early America was, how provisional its institutions. The story of the dollar is the story of the country's independence and emergence - and it couldn't have been told more engagingly. Remarkable that it's an Englishman who has done it so well.

Almost from the beginning, money seems to have been an important part of the American experience. Paper money, introduced in Boston in 1698, was an American invention that challenged and reformed traditional notions of authority and value. As the world's first decimal currency, the dollar transformed trade. Greenback, Jason Goodwin's dollar-wise gallop through monetary history, is a feast of entertaining anecdotes and quirky details about the power of the buck.

Goodwin (Lords of the Horizon; A Time for Tea) takes readers on an intriguing journey into the history of money, chronicling its evolution from the time of the Spanish conquistadors to the 20th century. According to the author, Americans "experimented with money as no nation has ever had the chance to: wampum, paper currency, private banknotes, gold and silver, government money, bank money." The author describes the origins of paper currency in 1608 and goes on to detail the origins of the dollar bill, showing, for instance, that the pyramid on the modern dollar first appeared on Continental currency issued to pay for the American Revolution. From the founding of the Bank of the United States to counterfeiting schemes, the contributions of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson to our currency system, the establishment of the U.S. Mint, and the origins of the Greenback Party, Goodwin looks at the contributions money has made to our national life, including how it helped the United States grow and expand. Illustrations of currency in its various incarnations appear throughout, and an extensive bibliography is included. This informative and often entertaining account is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

British popular historian Goodwin (Lords of the Horizons, 1999, etc.) explains how the Yankee dollar replaced Spanish pieces of eight as the world’s most powerful money. One third of the value of American currency remains offshore, greasing the ways of lawful and illicit international commerce. Here’s the story of the birth and adolescence of a much-beloved, venerated medium of exchange. Starting with wampum, Goodwin describes the continental currency praised by Cotton Mather and delineates the financial scandals that roiled the country before Washington (1) took the CEO’s office. Jefferson (2) sponsored the decimal system, and Hamilton (10) promoted the notion of a national bank. Simoleons bore images of landscapes, railroads, factories, farms, Native Americans, and goddesses. The farther they wandered from home, the more bank notes were discounted. Myriad issues fostered counterfeiting, despite the warning legend that "To Counterfeit Is Death." (Artistic forgers duly reproduced the dire words.) President Jackson (20) lost his temper, dueled with the Bank of the United States, and killed it. Paper money was frequently so valueless it could be used as a "shinplaster" to bandage a scraped leg. The Roman X on the ten reminded carpenters of the sawbuck used to prop up their work. The nation’s Great Seal found its way on the greenback with its enigmatic, all-seeing eye, but nobody is sure why. The dollar symbol’s origin is ultimately obscure, Goodwin concludes. He supplies interesting tales of copper- and steel-plate engravers, nice asides, and neat character sketches (most entertaining, some unnecessary for American readers). Here are yesteryear’s gold bugs, silverites, and bimetallists.Finally, William Jennings Bryan appears with his popular "Cross of Gold" oration. With no reference to the Susan B. Anthony coin or Boggs, the artist who literally draws his own pay, the text is more about monetary history than current design, production, or usage. An interesting and valiant attempt to encompass a subject that may be too cumbersome for one volume. Author tour

Praise for Lords of the Horizons: "A work of dazzling beauty . . . the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing."-The New York Times Book Review "Jason Goodwin's deftly written and beguiling history of the Ottoman Empire is particularly pertinent today, when the cauldron of ancient hatreds once more boils over, but his prose would be welcome at any time."-The Boston Globe "May be read with pleasure and profit by everyone, not least the traveler headed east of Vienna and west of Baghdad."-The Wall Street Journal

Most people find that what they really like about money is more of it, but only Americans started with a clean slate and a belief that if only they could hit on the right formula their dreams would come true. They experimented with money as no other nation ever had the chance to: wampum, paper currency, private bank notes, gold and silver, government money, bank money. On the way, the people learned to strike a deal, fix a price, watch their interests. They learned how to conjure money not out of the thin air exactly, but out of the natural riches of the land and the ingenuity of their own minds, and fell to arguing how much, relatively speaking, it was worth.

The reviewers above aptly point out some of this book's shortcomings: the full narrative thread isn't always followed, some glaring questions go unanswered. What they don't say is how much fun and interesting the book is, despite its shortcomings. As a good general introduction to the subject it is very interesting, quite funny and extremely well written.