Collecting Friends: Boston Tea Party

Boston Tea Party

Steve: Commemorative coins and rethinking historical events. 

The U.S. Mint is potentially revisiting some of its classic designs for America’s semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) in 2026, polling the public on events it would like to see honored and designs that it would like to see again on coins. 

Last year saw the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The Dec. 16, 1773, event saw citizens protesting what they perceived to be unfair trade practices imposed by the British that allowed the British East India Company to sell tea from China in American Colonies. The Sons of Liberty in colonial Massachusetts destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company, throwing the chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. The British government viewed the act as treason and the episode is viewed as a catalyst to the American Revolution. 

In recent times, reenactors tossed 2,000 pounds of tea – donated from around the world – into the Boston Harbor. Jennifer Schuessler asked in an article in the Dec. 16, 2023, edition of The New York Times: “How do we celebrate a fight for liberty that took place in a period when many Americans, including in Boston, were enslaved?” Historians today largely take a broader view of the event, and today it’s taught in some schools as part of a discussion of the nature of freedom. 

Given the importance of the event, and its popularity, I was surprised that it was never on a U.S. coin. In 2023 the modern East India Company produced a limited mintage legal tender silver coin from St. Helena with a handsome “Tea Party” design by Joel Iskowitz on one side – with a left-side portrait of King Charles III on the other. The four silver and three gold issues share the same design and were issued in partnership with the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. 

Dennis, are there any major U.S. historical events that haven’t yet made it to a U.S. coin that surprise you? 

Dennis: Now that you mention it, taking a look at the past twenty years of U.S. commemorative coins, I don’t see many historical events at all! People, places, organizations, and “things” are well represented. But events are scarce.

I see coins celebrating groups like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Boys Town, Lions Club International, and American Legion.

Some honor government agencies like the U.S. Marshals Service and the National Park Service.

Many more celebrate individuals (Thomas Edison, John Marshall, Benjamin Franklin, Louis Braille, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Christa McAuliffe).

 

Some show places, like the San Francisco Old Mint or Jamestown, Virginia.

There are military-themed commemoratives for disabled veterans, infantry soldiers, five-star generals, the U.S. Army, the 230th anniversary of the Marine Corps.

Some of the coins draw attention to museums like the baseball and basketball Halls of Fame, and the National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum.

Others celebrate tangible things: bald eagles, the Medal of Honor, the Star-Spangled Banner. 

But, what about events?

A few recent coins commemorate years-long movements and campaigns. I wouldn’t define these as “events” the way the Boston Tea Party was. The Lewis and Clark expedition (silver dollar, 2004) lasted longer than two years. American military action in World War I (silver dollar, 2018) stretched over a year and a half. The women’s suffrage movement (silver dollar, 2020) started decades before it paid off in voting rights in 1919.

 

Maybe the recent coins that come closest to marking a single big event are the 2007 silver dollar for Little Rock Central High School’s desegregation . . . the 2014 silver dollar for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . . and the three coins honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11.

In comparison, the “classic” era of American commemoratives honored many more events, if you count military battles and a half dozen national and international expositions. The signing of the Declaration of Independence was marked by a 1926 half dollar and gold quarter eagle. These really seem like exceptions, though, when you consider that hundreds of commemoratives have been issued since 1892, and hundreds of circulating commems (like the State quarters) since 1999.

If coins have a light record when it comes to capturing the events of our national history, medals are another story. It’s in medallic art—some of it official and much of it privately issued—that I see many historic events remembered.

Congressional Gold Medals are usually offered for sale to the public in bronze versions (dollar-sized and larger three-inch formats). Some recent examples mark the day in 1957 when nine Black students were escorted up the steps of desegregated Little Rock Central High School; the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the 1965 voting-rights protest marches from Selma to Montgomery; the terror and bravery of 9/11; and the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and the heroic response of law enforcement.

 

Government doesn’t have a monopoly here. Private companies can create and issue medals, too. The Franklin Mint’s “History of the United States” collection had 200 medals that captured nearly every kind of historic American event you can think of. The 1778 winter at Valley Forge, Washington taking leave of his officers, the completion of the Erie Canal, the California Gold Rush, the Lincoln-Douglas debates . . . up to the 1970s with Nixon’s peace mission to China, U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and celebration of the Bicentennial. This is just a small portion of the thousands of medals that collectors can seek, celebrating events big and small in American history. Many of these events would be appropriate for commemorative coins. Maybe we’ll see some of them in future programs from the United States Mint.

Be on the lookout for another installment of Collecting Friends next month or subscribe here and never miss a post! In the meantime, explore beautiful coins from the ANA's Edward C. Rochette Money Museum Virtual Exhibits.

About the Collecting Friends Blog

Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”

We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible. 

We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway. 

For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”). 

Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.

We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.

We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it! 

About the American Numismatic Association

The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.

The ANA helps all people discover and explore the world of money through its vast array of educational programs including its museum, library, publications, conventions and numismatic seminars.