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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 3202964, member: 72790&quot;]Pretty much agree, but the remedy may be different from what you are planning. I have always liked the study, or just reading of history and for me the coins and currency of the past are the tangible physical link to the period I am reading about. I acquired this interest quite early in my life, 1957 at the age of 13 when I purchased an 1865 three cent nickel. At the time I was reading a great deal about the US Civil War (Bruce Catton&#039;s books) and when I hit the end of the war I actually fingered the coin and imagined it was in the pocket of a soldier at Appomattox and I had a piece of Appomattox in my own pocket now. I majored in history and became a high school history teacher and the stamp and coin club advisor. It was in my classes, however, that the collecting of coins paid off. I put together, over the years, a collection of every period I taught from Ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantine and Medieval, Renaissance, Napoleonic right up the WW II. We never seemed to get much past that. In my US History courses I did the monetary system used in the 13 Colonies (every European coin of the 17th and 18th Centuries circulated in Colonial America), the Jeffersonian Period and the first US federal coinage (maybe that 50 cent piece helped pay for Louisiana), the Jacksonian period with its bewildering variety (and often dubious value) of private and state bank notes (maybe this 50 cent piece backed up a state bank note, before the panic of 1837 made it worthless). With the Civil war, all kinds of strange denomination coins were circulated, until after a few months after the start of the war they mostly disappeared from circulation and were replaced by Greenbacks and fractional paper currency. And of course I was rich in Confederate bonds and hundred dollar bills. All of this stuff was passed around the room for the kids to handle. A tetradrachma of Alexander the Great, a tribute penny of Tiberius, a solidus of Justinian , a penny of Edward the Confessor, a six pence of Charles II, a 1760 note of Colonial NJ, a note of one of Jackson&#039;s &quot;pet banks&quot;, a Confederate $5 bill like the one found in Lincoln&#039;s pocket the day he died, an Hawaiian US dollar bill&nbsp; for &quot;just in case&quot; use. In 43 years of teaching I never lost a single piece of coin, currency or artifact that I passed around in my classes.I will never tire of collecting the money of the past as the physical link to that past and if you, and other collectors, thought about numismatics in this way, you, too, will never grow bored with collecting those tangible links and ties to those who came before us. As Thucydides put it, by preserving the past we give the past the, (and those who lived it) the honor of remembrance. Now go and take that denarius or silver dollar out of its folder, finger it, and wonder who spent this coin, what did it buy, how did it wind up in my hands so many years later. Still don&#039;t want to pursue and possess the past?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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