The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money

National Archives Museum
Online

The Continental Dollar is a revelatory history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Farley Grubb upends the common telling of this story, in which the United States printed Continentals to serve as an early fiat currency—a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold but rather to a legal authority. As Grubb details, the Continental was not a fiat currency but a “zero-coupon bond”—a wholly different species of money. As bond payoffs were pushed into the future, the money’s value declined, killing the Continentals’ viability years before the Revolutionary War would officially end.