This guest post was authored by 2024 Junior Fellow Kelsey Moore, a University of North Carolina at Greensboro graduate, with a B.A. in Spanish and B.S. in Information Science. Kelsey is continuing her studies at UNCG in the MLIS program.
This summer, I worked as a junior fellow with the Business Section to organize and take inventory of the American Bankers Association pamphlet collection. The American Bankers Association (ABA) was founded in 1875 as a trade association to advocate for banking industry perspectives in the shaping of policy decisions. With the closure of its library, the ABA donated a 14-box collection of nearly 400 banking pamphlets and a scrapbook from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The materials primarily focus on central banking, all the way from the First Bank of the United States to the Federal Reserve, and the currency question, which is the debate over the gold and silver standard. Throughout the duration of my internship, I worked with my project mentor, Lynn Weinstein, to create a library guide that provides historical background information for the topics covered by the collection.
In our new Banking History: Central Banking and the Currency Question in the United States research guide, we have compiled sets of digital and print resources that add to the pamphlet collection by diving deeper into central banking and the currency question as well as providing more general sources on U.S. banking history. Featured digital resources from the Library, listed in the guide, include blog posts and research guides, such as pages from “This Month in Business History” which highlight sources of information on more specific subjects, like the development of the Treasury Department or the U.S. Mint.
The research guide also incorporates a finding aid with tables that list the individual pamphlets in order according to their physical locations within the ABA pamphlet collection. This finding aid will help readers know which boxes to request if they wish to access one or more pamphlets from the collection, since the boxes will be housed in offsite storage. Many of the pamphlets are also available electronically or have copies in locations at the Library, where they can be retrieved at a quicker rate. Any existing catalog records and electronic copies for individual items have been linked within the finding aid.
At the end of my internship, I had the opportunity to share the research guide at the Junior Fellows Display Day, along with pamphlets from the collection that stood out the most to me. This included From Slavery to Bankers, which tells the history of the first African American owned bank, the Grand Fountain Savings Bank, in Richmond, Virginia. Another item on display was The Pleasant Art of Money Catching, a pamphlet that discusses how to manage savings and personal finances in the nineteenth century.
Our goal for this research guide has been to provide researchers with a starting point for navigating key components of banking history and monetary policy in the United States. Additionally, my work with organizing the collection and putting together a finding aid for the guide will increase the accessibility of the ABA pamphlet collection.
Learn More about the History of Money:
- Read about another unique find of the pamphlet collection in the blog post Shell Money as the Original Currency in the American Colonies.
- If you are interested in learning more about the history of money, check out the research guide Money: Researching the History of U.S. and International Currencies.
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