Numismatic history of the United States

The numismatic history of the United States began with Colonial coins such as the pine tree shilling and paper money; most notably the foreign but widely accepted Spanish piece of eight,[1] ultimately descended from the Joachimsthaler and the direct ancestor of the U.S.

According to legend these first half disme coins were minted from Martha Washington's silverware.

United States Seated Liberty coinage was the silver coin design minted in the mid-to-late 19th century.

This changed between 1856 and 1857 when they were replaced by the small-sized Flying Eagle cent, which was made of 88% copper and 12% nickel, and had a somewhat pale brown color.

The five cent nickel coin was introduced in 1866, and gradually it made the half dime obsolete.

It was the first American coin to display the phrase In God We Trust, a result of the increased wartime religiosity during the Civil War.

The year 1892 saw the designs of Charles E. Barber adorn the dime, quarter and half dollar.

His Liberty Head nickel had debuted in 1883, and thus from the years 1892 to 1904, his designs were featured on every denomination from 5 cents up to one dollar.

The 1892 Columbian Exposition Commemorative Half Dollar, engraved by Barber, was the first American coin that featured the face of an actual person (rather than Liberty).

The design of the American One dollar bill has stayed almost the same since 1935, and the other denominations had a similar appearance until their redesign in the late 1990s.

The new tradition of placing past presidents and Founding Fathers on coins, which had begun with the 1909 Lincoln cent, continued in the 1930s and 1940s, with the introduction of the Washington quarter in 1932, the Jefferson nickel in 1938, the Roosevelt dime in 1946, and the Franklin half dollar in 1948.

The original Washington quarter design remained unchanged, aside from the removal of silver content and finer details, up to 1998, the Jefferson nickel up to 2003, and the Roosevelt dime to the present day.

The paper money of the United States was re-designed to deter counterfeit through the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s.