Pocketful Of History: Four Hundred Years of America – One State Quarter At A Time
Book Reviews | Jun 18th, 2008
Author: Jim Noles
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Genre: History
Pages: 324
Retail Price: 0.00
Buy on Amazon.com link
As a United States citizen, I am duty bound to know absolutely nothing about United States history.
However, 10 years ago, Congress decided to do something about it. They decided to teach its citizens about their great country by targeting the one thing we universally love: money. And so the 50 State Quarters Program was born, with new quarters popping up every year commemorating the varying historical importance and questionably interesting attributes of each state, allowing us to contemplate patriotically as we do our laundry or play slots.
In A Pocketful of History, Jim Noles tells the story behind each shiny depiction and representation. The book is organized by state, in order of each state’s inclusion into the Union. Each chapter is 5-7 pages that describes why such and such design was selected for the state and what it represents.
The book is written well if breezily and for a popular audience, and Noles does his best given the source material. You see, to be honest, the 50 State Quarters Program didn’t quite live up to being the ideal teaching aid to provide, in Noles’ words, “the scale and sweep of America’s history.”
Noles himself seems dejected in his introduction, hoping the program would create “a set of coins that… would speak of discovery, exploration, colonization, revolution, evolution, immigration, emancipation, and migration. Of civil war, civil reconciliation, and civil rights… Of an Industrial Age, a Gilded Age, a Jazz Age, a Space Age, and an Information Age.” But instead we mostly got the usual iconic cliches and a whole lot of birds, horses, mountains, and buffalo.
The inside flap showcases some of my favorite examples of the inanity of some of the design decisions and Noles’ attempts to make them interesting:
“Jim Noles… looks at each quarter in turn to answer these curious questions: Who is Caesar Rodney and why is he riding a horse on Delaware’s quarter? What happened to New Hampshire’s symbol, the “Old Man in the Mountain,” three years after its quarter was minted? What famous racecourse is memorialized on the quarter from the state known as the ‘Crossroads of America’?”
I can’t think of questions I care less about. But this book really makes the point – unintentionally – that what distinguishes or defines a state rarely has anything to do with its historical achievement. I mean, Georgia chose a peach, Vermont has maple trees and syrup, Maine has a lighthouse, and – my favorite – Rhode Island is represented by a yacht. Did these things really contribute to the survival and fabric of the country (besides maple syrup, which is awesome)?
To be fair, there is some historical reasoning behind many of the stranger designs. For instance, Mississippi’s magnolia leaves are a very slight, indirect reference to the Civil War (and by the way – the Civil War isn’t depicted or inferred on any coin). But magnolia leaves instead of something about the civil rights era? (Alabama is also quiet on the matter, depicting Helen Keller, which all things considered, is better than a jug of moonshine.)
But anyway, these are critiques of the Program and not of the book, which is fun to read and educational in its own way. And if you collect the coins, this book will provide a ton of context. For me, the coins are simply soda machine fodder. Except for Bicentennials. Those I keep.
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