Anthropology of Currency
Last week, the Chapin Library and Williams College Archives & Special Collections welcomed Visiting Assistant Professor Llerena Searle’s Anthropology class, “Financial Lives”, concerned with aspects of finance and investment.
The collections of the Chapin Library and College Archives hold many examples of ancient and modern coinage, bills, ledgers, and other financial accounts, as well as books and broadsides dealing with currency and financial issues. Students carefully examined materials ranging from a coin from the reign of Roman Emperor Tiberius to the 1747/8 account book of Fort Massachusetts, a United States 1785 ten-dollar gold coin, George Washington’s manuscript account of his (losing) investments in Revolutionary War loan certificates, American money of the colonial period, and currency issued by the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. – JGD/SKB/WGH
