Listen to a short interview with Stephen MihmHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs--more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation.

Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking.

Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. We learn how the federal government issued greenbacks for the first time and began dismantling the older monetary system and the counterfeit economy it sustained.

A Nation of Counterfeiters is a trailblazing work of history, one that casts the country's capitalist roots in a startling new light. Readers will recognize the same get-rich-quick spirit that lives on in the speculative bubbles and confidence games of the twenty-first century.

Mihm brings to teeming life a world most Americans never knew existed, a world in which every single purchase was inflected with an additional layer of anxiety about the very currency in which the purchase was to be transacted. Written with exceptional intelligence and bracing wit, A Nation of Counterfeiters is fresh, fascinating and altogether original. -- Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania A meticulous and imaginative reconstruction of an entire counterfeit economy that intersected and overlapped with the 'legitimate' economy. A Nation of Counterfeiters is marvelous and unusual history. There really is nothing like it in the literature. -- Bruce H. Mann, Harvard Law School Stephen Mihm's elegant study demonstrates that 'making money' once had a more literal meaning, when thousands of banks printed their own currency notes and numerous counterfeiters profitably imitated them. Mihm offers an absorbing and enlightening history of the complex relations between money, national stability, and the forging of American character. -- Richard Sylla, New York University With imaginative research and crystalline prose, Stephen Mihm casts unprecedented light on the confidence games at the heart of early American capitalism. He also introduces us to an irresistible cast of characters, whose brazen exploits provide a new frame for understanding nineteenth century economic debate. A Nation of Counterfeiters is a brilliant synthesis of business and cultural history. This is a book to take seriously. -- Jackson Lears, author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America

About the Author
Stephen Mihm is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

Reviews
Mihm brings to teeming life a world most Americans never knew existed, a world in which every single purchase was inflected with an additional layer of anxiety about the very currency in which the purchase was to be transacted. Written with exceptional intelligence and bracing wit, A Nation of Counterfeiters is fresh, fascinating and altogether original. -- Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania
A meticulous and imaginative reconstruction of an entire counterfeit economy that intersected and overlapped with the 'legitimate' economy. A Nation of Counterfeiters is marvelous and unusual history. There really is nothing like it in the literature. -- Bruce H. Mann, Harvard Law School
Stephen Mihm's elegant study demonstrates that 'making money' once had a more literal meaning, when thousands of banks printed their own currency notes and numerous counterfeiters profitably imitated them. Mihm offers an absorbing and enlightening history of the complex relations between money, national stability, and the forging of American character. -- Richard Sylla, New York University
With imaginative research and crystalline prose, Stephen Mihm casts unprecedented light on the confidence games at the heart of early American capitalism. He also introduces us to an irresistible cast of characters, whose brazen exploits provide a new frame for understanding nineteenth century economic debate. A Nation of Counterfeiters is a brilliant synthesis of business and cultural history. This is a book to take seriously. -- Jackson Lears, author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America
Mihm vividly and entertainingly describes the muddled and often fraudulent economy of pre-greenback America: those freewheeling, pre-Civil War days when the federal government not only did not print paper money but likewise did not bother to regulate those regional banks that did. * Publishers Weekly *
Marvelously entertaining...There are enough shifty characters and bizarre incidents in here to outfit a hundred novels. -- Roger K. Miller * Denver Post *
Mihm's colorful...account of our early economic history follows a bedraggled cast of con artists, engravers, and gangsters who fueled the Republic's nascent capitalist endeavors with illicit currency. From the Vermont woodlands to the jostling thoroughfares of Manhattan, this cat-and-mouse tale of subterfuge and deceit culminates in the birth of the Federal Reserve and a true national currency. It's a story that in many ways mirrors the country's ascendance from a rangy colonial outpost to an unrivaled economic power. -- Gabriel Sherman * Conde Nast Portfolio *
[A] revelatory, entertaining book. * New Yorker *
This is a fun book...Mihm's creative account of the early American economy shines, spotlighting the on-the-edge inventiveness, and over-the-edge cons, that have made the United States so rich in risk, reward and redemption. -- Stephen Kotkin * New York Times *
A brilliant description of a time in American history that seems at once distant and familiar. Mihm's book is a lucid history of counterfeiting in antebellum America, that dark art's golden age, so to speak. -- Steve Fraser * The Nation *
Between the Revolutionary era, when the Continental was America's currency, and the Civil War, which brought us the greenback, the U.S. had no national paper currency. Chartered banks and their privately issued notes proliferated. The babel of competing bills created fertile ground for counterfeits, which sprang up like mushrooms. By the 1850s, thousands of different breeds of paper passed as American money. In A Nation of Counterfeiters, Stephen Mihm's relentless sleuthing and lively prose reanimate a world in which every dollar had to be carefully read. This rogues gallery of forgers, coinshavers and engravers-gone-bad holds up a funhouse mirror to the entrepreneurial face of American money-making. -- Jane Kamensky * Wall Street Journal *


Awards
Nominated for President's Book Award 2005 and Pulitzer Prizes 2008 and OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award 2008 and Bancroft Prize 2008 and Hagley Prize in Business History 2008 and PROSE Awards 2007 and Mark Lynton History Prize 2008 and James Willard Hurst Prize 2008 and Henry Adams Prize 2008 and Lawrence W. Levine Award 2008 and Francis Parkman Prize 2008 and Alice Hanson Jones Prize 2008 and William H. Riker Book Award 2008 and Allan Sharlin Memorial Award 2008 and John H. Dunning Prize 2009 and Hagley Prize in Business History 2009.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674032446
Author Stephen Mihm
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press