A Collection Of What We Love In Numismatic History

MacNeil stated that the obverse depicted Liberty "stepping forward in ... the defense of peace as her ultimate goal". According to art historian Cornelius Vermeule, "Liberty is presented as the Athena of the Parthenon pediments, a powerful woman striding forward" and states that, but for the Stars and Stripes on her shield, "everything else about this Amazon calls to mind Greek sculpture of the period between Pheidias to Praxiteles, 450 to 350 BC."

The Greek Parthenon in the Acropolis in Athens



The main Treasury Building in Washington DC

For me, seeing the 1913 Liberty nickel on Hawaii 5-0, one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, left a real impression. That coin was the Olsen speciment, and is the second finest of the five known. I will always think this one is more special than the Eliasberg specimen which may grade higher.

Book'em Dan-O!

Love the serial # 5050505-050. Someone had a sense of humor...

I like that slab almost as much as the nickel!





There is an exact duplicate of the Parthenon in Nashville. Although the one in Nashville is in slightly better condition and has a copy of the statue within

The Greeks were so wanting perfection for this temple that there actually are very few straight line in the building.

They understood distance will make a straight object look curved, so, for example, they made the pillars ever so slightly convex (entasis). At a distance the pillars look perfectly straight. If you know to look for this, you see it. If not, it just sort of registers in the brain as a little "off." somehow.

My first view of the Parthenon was from quite a distance and, knowing what to look for, it was not hard to note the building looked "cropped into" the view. Or at least it was more "crisp" than the surroundings.

Think about that for being ancient tech!

Beautiful!

A snapshot of the wealth of nations in 1884. Note that the U.S. is the wealthiest in aggregate even in 1884. On a per capita basis, France and Cuba are far wealtheir.

France is surprising about 70 years after the Napoleonic Wars, and the disastrous reign of Louis XVI that led to the French revolution a hundred years earlier.

Cuba was surprising, but illustrates again how profitable the sugar cane trade was, and the huge money that slavery supported. Slavery was abolished in Cuba on October 7, 1886.

Both France and Cuba suffered from extreme distributional issues in their economies where a small proportion of land owners controlled most of the nation's wealth and commerce and most peasants in the country lived in dire poverty.

The Philadelphia Mint as of 1884 kept records of the number of dies it produced and distributed to the branch mints.

One thing that stands out is that you didn't need many dies for gold coins because apparently they never wear out.

In contrast, for the nickel 5 cent coins, you needed a huge number of dies because the hard metal caused dies to wear out very quickly.

Thanks for your support on this thread.