From the author of Lords of the Horizons, the fascinating story of a new kind of money for a new world. Money has always been at the heart of the American experience. Paper money itself, invented in Boston in 1698, was a classic of American ingenuity--and American disregard for authority and tradition. With the wry and admiring eye of a modern De Tocqueville, Jason Goodwin has written a biography of the dollar giving us the story of its astonishing career through the wilds of American history. Greenback looks at the dollar over the years as a form of art, a kind of advertising, a reflection of American attitudes, and a builder of empires. Goodwin shows us how the dollar rolled out the frontier, peopled the Plains; how it erected the great cities; how it expressed the urges of democracy and opportunity. And above all, he introduces us to the people who championed--or ambushed--the dollar over the years: presidents, artists, pioneers and frontiersmen, bankers shady and upright, safe-blowers, and crooks and dreamers of every stripe. It's a vast and colorful cast of characters, all agreed on one thing: getting the money right was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Greenback delves into folklore and the development of printing, investigates wildcats and counterfeiters, explains why a buck is a buck and how Dixie got its name. Like Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons, another story of empire, Greenback brings an array of quirky detail and surprising--often hilarious--anecdote to tell the story of America through its best-beloved product.