January 20, 2020: "Before the Liberty Cap"

Author:
T. Keenan

Concept:
Before the Liberty Cap designed graced our the 1793 Half Cent, a similar motif would appear first on the 1781 Libertas Americana medal, and then on this circa 1792 Liberte Françoise Medal. Thus informing our guest author’s “Liberty Cap before the Liberty Cap.” caption to highlight this cool, interesting, extremely popular and (importantly) relatively affordable Choice Unc. example.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Our alternatives this week centered around the bell metal composition of this piece, and the mathematical “Liberty Cap + Bell Metal = Liberty Bell.” Which was then truncated to “Liberty, Bell.” and also just “Liberty Bell.” before we decided the whole approach was both uninteresting and potentially confusing to an audience who 1) Would not necessarily know that these are made of bell metal, 2) Would not know what bell metal was, and 3) Would not care even if they did.

So we abandoned that approach post haste.