NATIONAL NUMISMATIC COLLECTION UPDATES

We have some updates from the NNC that we want to share with your readers.

First, we are updating The Value of Money gallery as it approaches its 10th birthday next year. For this purpose, we have closed the gallery to the public and it will reopen around November 15, 2024. For a description of the updates and new content, please see here.

Also, the NNC was recently featured in the Smithsonian's podcast Sidedoor in an episode on Jim the Penman. You can find that here.

Finally, over the past two years we have been working in partnership with the National Museum of Ukraine in the Second World War (also known as the War Museum) to create a web exhibition using coins, banknotes, and stamps to highlight Ukraine's cultural heritage and the impact of the Russian invasion on it. You can see that here.

 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS
Value of Money
Updated Exhibition Experience
Gallery of Numismatics, One West
Opens Nov. 15 - Ongoing

"The Value of Money" exhibition features a number of updates to mark its 10-year anniversary and will include a changing display case, a refreshed entry feature and extensive new content. The exhibition connects American history to global histories of exchange, innovation, political change, and cultural interaction and expression through more than 300 objects from the museum's National Numismatic Collection. Behind the massive vault door entrance, the new entryway includes diverse objects spanning more than 4,000 years from ancient cuneiform tablets to modern money. Across the gallery, visitors will see some of the collection's most recently acquired objects, including an IRS agent's laptop that helped the U.S. government seize $3.6 billion of stolen cryptocurrency in 2022 – resulting in the largest financial seizure in U.S. history. Another recent addition, Chinese coins from the Howard F. Bowker Collection will explore the history of money in China. A special display, "Revolutionary Money," features the wide range of objects in circulation in early America, such as a beaver pelt, colonial and European coins, and Continental banknotes. Popular objects, among the rarest in the world, will continue to delight visitors, including the legendary "1933 Double Eagle," the first U.S. $20 gold coin from 1849, a $100,000 bill printed in 1934, and the famous 1804 silver dollars known as "the king of coins."

 

To read the complete article, see:
Calendar of Exhibitions and Events: November 2024 and Native American Heritage Month (https://americanhistory.si.edu/press/releases/November-2024-calendar)

 

During the mid-1800s, one third of all paper money in America was thought to be fake. It was the golden age of counterfeiting, and one exceptionally talented con artist stood out from all the rest. His fakes were nearly perfect…but for a trademark tell. Known to law enforcement only as "Jim the Penman," this celebrity criminal led many Americans to wonder—can great art truly be criminal?

To read the complete article, see:
Jim the Penman (https://www.si.edu/sidedoor/jim-penman)

Coins, banknotes, and stamps are made to circulate. As they travel, they carry evidence of the places they were made and the people who made them. Ukrainian coins, banknotes, and stamps feature national symbols and diverse cultural heritage sites spanning more than a thousand years.

As Russian leaders seek to erase Ukrainian national and cultural identity by actively targeting heritage sites, these small circulating objects have the outsized role of preserving this heritage in pockets, mailboxes, and collections around the globe.

The artifacts in this exhibition represent a unique cross-section of Ukraine's enduring statehood and heritage. Brought together from museum collections in Ukraine and the United States, they showcase Ukrainian history, diversity, and resilience.

To read the complete article, see:
Preservation Through Circulation: Ukraine's Enduring Statehood and Heritage (https://global.si.edu/success-stories/preservation-through-circulation-en)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web