Description:
In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how Americans accumulated and wielded monetary information in order to navigate the early republic's chaotic bank note system. He demonstrates that the shift to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era eliminated the public's need for detailed financial knowledge.
Review Quotes: "In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua Greenberg investigates early Americans' day-to-day experience with bank notes and makes the persuasive case that they were better financially educated than we are today...Greenberg's study comes alive as he shows how early Americans navigated the material, cultural, and political world of paper money in the years of the early republic and learned the important lesson of the difference between a reputable bank note that retained its face value, an uncurrent bill that might trade at a discount, and shinplaster issued by a disreputable local business...Greenberg's timely and important book advances previous studies of early and nineteenth-century American economy and finance in its attention to the textual, visual, and material culture of banking and paper money."-- "American Nineteenth Century Historry"