America's paper money : a canvas for an emerging nation

"In 1690, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first government in the Western world to print paper money, the imagery for which initiated an indigenous American art form of remarkable dynamism and originality. After the Revolutionary War, disillusioned by how quickly its promiscuous printing of Continental currency had led to hyperinflation, the government of the United States left it to private institutions, such as state-chartered banks, to carry on this American tradition. Bank notes, adorned with a vast variety of images, soon became the fledgling country's primary currency. In 1861, in response to the pressures of the Civil War, the federal government began to take charge of the paper-money supply by creating a national currency and a national banking system. At the same time, the Confederate States of America was creating a competing self-image, which was also heavily indebted to bank-note vignettes. Issued in 1896, the Silver Certificates Series, a collaboration between government engravers and well-known artists, marked the apex of American currency design. With the explosion of the number of banks operating throughout the country, the imagery on paper currency provided the nation with its most widely distributed iconography (some estimates number over 15,000 different vignettes). Although security printing enjoyed a niche of its own, it was also closely involved in the overall development of American art. Of all of America's arts, paper money reached the widest audience in its exaltation and popularization of White America's imagined self. Like painting, it engaged in a larger cultural discourse, communicating in a public forum a national identity and purpose. By instilling confidence in the value of the money and in the country itself, this imagery, the product of American creativity and technical ingenuity, conjured up a narrative for a nation that was without precedent or peers."