The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued fiat paper money as their principal internal medium of exchange. This system arose piecemeal across the colonies making the paper money creation story for each colony unique. It was true monetary...

Resources to fight the War for Independence from Great Britain (1775-1783) were to be provided to the U.S. Congress by the individual states based on each state’s population share in the united colonies. Congressional spending, however, largely flowed to where the theater of war was located....

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to convince the reader that the Continental dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond and not a fiat currency—thereby overturning 230 years of scholarly interpretation; to show that the public and leading Americans knew and acted on this fact, and to illustrate the...