Will Nipper’s new book, In Yankee Doodle’s Pocket: The Myth, Magic and Politics of Money in Early America, 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. Based on years of research, 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.
Available from Bowmanstone Press $58.95 + Shipping & Handling.
SBN 978-0-9816638-0-7
Size: 8.5 x 11 inches, 576 pages, 4 lbs. 6 ounces
Binding: Premium hardcover, sewn, copper foil stamping on front and spine
