On the money
OUR FACULTY | It’s not every day that a historian is asked to join a select group of scholars from around the country to give advice to the U.S. Treasury secretary, but that’s what happened recently to Professor Arwen Mohun, who studies the social and cultural history of technology.
Earlier this fall, she spent a day at the Smithsonian Institution, along with 15 other nationally recognized historians from prominent universities and organizations, invited by the Treasury to offer input on the question of a redesigned $10 bill.
The group gathered at a conference table, in a room guarded by the Secret Service, and spoke with Treasury Secretary Jacob (Jack) Lew and U.S. Treasurer Rosa Rios, while Treasury Department staffers sat nearby and listened in on the discussion.
“They wanted to find out who we thought would be the best choice and why,” Mohun said. “There were social and cultural historians, currency historians and women’s historians. It was very interesting to hear how different people see this issue so differently.”
Treasury Secretary Lew announced earlier this year that a new bill to be issued in 2020 would, for the first time in more than a century, feature a woman’s portrait. At the time of this publication, no decision had been made by Lew, who does not need any further approval to authorize a new bill.
Mohun suspects that the final choice will come down to two women—Eleanor Roosevelt or Harriet Tubman.
She went to the roundtable with a preference for selecting Tubman, the former slave who led many others to freedom via the Underground Railroad. An abolitionist, humanitarian and Civil War spy for the Union, Tubman would be the first African American ever pictured on U.S. currency, and Mohun said she thinks that would make an important statement.
“The U.S. currency is really a global currency,” accepted virtually everywhere, she said. “Whoever is chosen to be on the bill will tell the world something about America’s values.”
Article by Ann Manser, AS73
