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Foreword
Although I have read many scattered accounts of activities of the Philadelphia
Mint in the 1790s and early 1800s, many questions remained unanswered. I have
found traditional sources to vary in their reliability.
Frank Stewart's 1924 book, History of the First United Sates Mint, Its People
and Its Operations, is very good, but leaves the reader wishing that more
had been said. Don Taxay's magnum opus, U.S. Mint and Coinage,
1966, was considered by many to be the definitive source on the title subject,
until researchers began reading it carefully, finding many errors of fact,
probably from assumptions furnished by Walter Breen, the
major outside contributor to the book. Still, it remains very
useful. The Taxay work was written in
a quarter century of misinformation, from 1950 to about 1975, when Breen
reigned as the undisputed icon in American numismatic research. While
quite a few other students of mints and minting found problems
here and there with some of Walter's writings, the full extent of his errors
was not known until later, when the present marvelous era of
numismatic research took hold. A half dozen or more scholars entered the
field, one of whom was Karl Moulton. Located in Congress, Arizona, Karl
and his wife Jenny are well know as dealers in out-of-print numismatic
literature, most importantly the auction catalogs
issued by many different firms from the
mid-19th century down to the present day.
The
new methodology employed by Moulton and several others, quite unlike that used
by Breen, has been to evaluate source material, add modern commentary, a few
opinions (strictly identified as such), and generate
information that readers will find to be quite useful. One of my
favorite thoughts is that 1 coin plus1 book or reference source about that
coin will equal not 2, but 3 units of numismatic enjoyment.
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