| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. By Stephen Mihm. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xii, 457 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02657-5.)
Historians have, dare I say, rediscovered early America's banking and monetary arrangements as worthy subjects of historical inquiry. For the past two decades, economic historians have investigated the extent to which banks contributed to the country's early capitalist development. Historians are addressing a fundamental question of their own; namely, how did Americans come to trust banks and to accept freely the pieces of paper banks circulated as money?	1
Stephen Mihm demonstrates that building the public's trust in bank currency was neither simple nor inevitable and that such trust, once established, could be exploited and undermined by industrious con men. By the 1850s the United States' currency was a bewildering array of ten thousand banknotes and a thousand different kinds of gold, silver, and copper coins (p. 3). Potential counterfeiters could not have envisioned a more congenial environment, and, not surprisingly, counterfeit notes became as ubiquitous as legitimate ones.	. . .

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