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In the summer of 1861, the United States embarked on its first widespread use of paper money: the Demand Notes of 1861. Although their convertibility into gold ended at the end of that year, they remained acceptable for tariff payment at a par with gold coin while they were gradually replaced with paper money that did not share this provision, the Greenbacks. We present daily observations of exchange rates between the Notes, Greenbacks, and gold for the extended period during which they simultaneously circulated. These exchange rates substantiate our revisionist notion that the Notes were replaced because the tariff provision prevented them from generating sufficient seigniorage for wartime needs. ( JEL E42, N12, N22) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the aesthetics of presenting various historical artefacts, cultural documents, and ideological narratives at three museums in the United States of America: one tied to the African-American experience, one to the Confederate States of America, and the last one to the Old West, namely the National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio; the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia; and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. All three sites are clearly representative repositories and exhibits of 'a nation's memories'. The paper asks how these fascinating exhibits activate, echo, or fabricate the myths that cast the Civil War and its aftermath during the Reconstruction as a 'second founding' of the USA in an ongoing nationalistic 'singing of the nation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response by Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln, to three insightful scholars who analyzed the book at the recent meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle. Burton gives an overview of the book, in which Abraham Lincoln is the fulcrum around whom ideas and controversies swirled in the nineteenth century. It then proceeds to clarify points raised by the three critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]