Courtesy of Paul Hybert, we have added to Newman Portal a large group of U.S. congressional reports with numismatic content. This series now includes 375 items, and we acknowledge also Dan Hamelberg, who has previously contributed to this group. As Congress exercises its authority over the nation’s coinage, this series documents an important part of our numismatic history. Congress authorizes new coins, personal medals, and controls other aspects of coinage, such as the restoration of Mint marks in 1967. Link to U.S Congressional reports on Newman Portal:  Link to “Mint Marks,” S. 1008, a ..read more

The 1914 opening of the Panama Canal served as the theme for two expositions: the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915, and the Panama-California (International) Exposition held in San Diego in 1915-1916. Elongated coins, first widely introduced as souvenirs at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had become a popular feature of expositions, but the details surrounding their production have remained enigmatic. Here, using archival documents, Gastfriend demonstrates that the elongated coins produced at both 1915-1916 California expositions were the ..read more

The 1960s brought an intense public interest in coin collecting with the withdrawal of silver coinage from circulation. Coin stores appeared in nearly every city of a certain size, and increasingly thick numismatic publications were targeted at the collecting public. One of these titles was the , published monthly from 1964 to 1968. Edited by Ken Bressett, the Journal contained articles by Q. David Bowers, R. W. Julian, Neil Shafer, and other prominent writers. Whitman also published the , which was aimed at retailers of numismatic supplies. This publication contains little-known tidbits on va ..read more

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In the October 21, 2012 , Alaska dealer Dick Hanscom described a search for a long lost numismatic article that remained stubbornly lodged in his memory: “I remember an article in about a pressed disk made from placer gold. This would be in the years ownership of bullion was prohibited. Ownership of placer gold was legal, so this was a way to ‘fabricate’ it into a more convenient form rather than gold dust. I have looked through from 1970 to 1975 (the years that I believe it would have been) but have not had the opportunity to look through Dick recently updated the Newman Portal collection of ..read more

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Howland Wood (b. 1877) served as the American Numismatic Society (ANS) Curator from 1913 until his passing in 1938. The Society has preserved his extensive correspondence files, which are currently being digitized by Newman Portal at the ANS library. Already over 400 separate correspondents, covering the letters A-B, are represented in this group. While many of the correspondent names are obscure, the “usual suspects” are well represented, with David Bullowa, F. C. C. Boyd, M. H. Bolender, and Bauman Belden found in the first few pages of search results.  The Bullowa letters track David B ..read more

One of the most frequently accessed references on Newman Portal is Pete Smith’s Personal Tokens and Medals of American Numismatists , published in 2020. The popularity of certain documents on the Internet is sometimes somewhat of a mystery, but we’ve noticed that works that refer to many individual persons tend to run “hot.” This work has been accessed 8,386 times, indicating daily use by multiple people.  HAPPY NEW YEAR is a common theme on dealer tokens. Indeed, of the approximately 8,000 dealer tokens and medals cataloged in Pete Smith’s work, nearly 600 feature the inscription HAPPY N ..read more