Images reproduced from usmint.gov
Ask the average Joe on the street what the coins of America are, and he'll tell you: penny, nickel, dime, quarter. But what he may not mention are half-dollar and dollar coins, which depicted John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower respectively, and were a fair sight larger than the quarter, making them impractical as pocket change. I sometimes got them at my job from our older clients.
Well, in the mid-70s, the US Mint discontinued the Eisenhower, replacing it with a smaller dollar coin depicting women's suffragist Susan B. Anthony, whose tireless work enshrined women with the right to vote following the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
I remember in fifth grade that someone brought one of these to school, and there was a week-long search when they'd mislaid it.
The year before that, about 1997 or so, I was on a volleyball team--this was fourth grade. While we were doing our thing, PBS was running a Ken Burns miniseries documenting the Lewis and Clark expedition following Thomas Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon.
And leading Lewis and Clark on that expedition was a young woman named Scagawea, who navigated them down the trail while carrying her infant on her back...and who, in the year 2000, got her very own dollar coin, which you can see above.
She is only the second woman in American history to grace a coin, and there was no better choice for the new millennium than a guide, an explorer, to show us a new way forward while honoring Native American contributions to our historical tapestry...something that America's culture downplays to its peril...
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