→ All proceeds go to the non-profit organization, The Pursuit of History. More on that below.
About the book
In Yankee Doodle's Pocket offers fresh perspectives on America's celebrated ascent from disparate colonial outposts to sovereign power. Through the day-to-day instruments of trade and commerce, this work reveals the myriad threads of culture and hidden history that together wove a new nation. The associated facts, legends and theories are presented in a conversational narrative that all audiences can read and appreciate. In Yankee Doodle's Pocket links everyday objects with the larger-than-life people, events, societies and upheavals that brought them into existence. The tale begins with the earliest European forays into the wilderness and ends with the 1840 dawning of America's industrial age. In the frontier beginning, barter monies sprang from fields, forests and oceans. In the end monotonously uniform coins and printed paper spewed from urban factories born of the Industrial Revolution. Until then, America's coins and paper currency were works of art, as beautiful in their simplicity and hand-crafted variation as their European counterparts were in sophisticated perfection. These objects reveal an America that was surprisingly cosmopolitan and commercial from the start. They helped communicate ideas, foster expansion and enable transformation. Showing their independence, enterprising individuals, colonies, then states, then the new federal governments themselves, conceived their own instruments of commerce. Every new issue proclaimed the symbols and ideals of the day. As such, these artifacts were both witnesses to remarkable change and vital instruments of it. They tell of imperial and personal triumph - and folly. They celebrate our remarkable capacity for invention and adaptation. More importantly, they speak of the great American struggle between diversity and unanimity that was and remains a defining national principle. As we evolved from pluribus to something approaching unum, so did our money. This is the story of how it happened.
All proceeds go to the non-profit organization, The Pursuit of History
The Pursuit of History is the non-profit organization that engages adults in conversation about history and connects them with historic sites in their communities and across the country through unique annual events, including History Camp, and through video and other online content.