Bank Notes and Shinplasters

With startling insight and ingenuity, Joshua Greenberg’s Bank Notes and Shinplasters explores Americans’ fixation on the features that distinguished one bill from another amid the mishmash of money issued by banks and businesses before the Civil War…Greenberg and other historians’ designation of the Civil War as the great divide in American monetary history downplays banks’ continuing command of the money supply in the postwar period, particularly as checks and drafts on deposits took the place of cash in many transactions. Few studies, however, have devoted such deeply illuminating consideration to bank notes as literary, artistic, and material artifacts of the early United States. ~Journal of Early American History

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

Prior to the Civil War, thousands of different, ornately engraved bank notes supplied most of the money in circulation. In marvelous detail, Joshua R. Greenberg takes us back to the anxieties of that era. He deftly examines how every single cash transaction was shot through with uncertainty and arbitrage, as ordinary citizens struggled with the perils of counterfeit notes, fluctuating exchange rates, and worthless paper. In his revealing reconstruction of a monetary world long lost to us, Greenberg ultimately explains how these mundane exchanges shaped the seismic political events of the day, from the Bank War to the Civil War. A splendid book. ~Stephen Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters

Joshua R. Greenberg skillfully provides a history of how everyone in the early American republic pushed, pondered, purloined, politicized, and polemicized the thousands of material objects that circulated as their money. Historiographically significant and beautifully written, Bank Notes and Shinplasters will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of capitalism. ~Jessica Lepler, author of The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis

In this persuasive and entertaining book, Joshua R. Greenberg shows that early republic Americans had their mind on their money and their money on their mind. They put bank notes-valuable and counterfeit, pristine and soiled-to mundane and surprising commercial, cultural, and political uses. Greenberg traces the circulation of these bills as material objects from bank vaults, to store tills, to consumers' pockets and back again. In so doing, he makes compelling use of them himself to register the contested economic and emotional meanings that these ubiquitous instruments had for Americans who held and passed them. I love this book. ~Brian Luskey, author of On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America