Xavier just informed me that I am now the referee for United States - Pre-Federal (a country that I in fact created).
I have a few dedicated reference books on the subject so I'll really try to improve the catalog. In America these coins are always the hot-ticket items at coin shows but don't seem to get much attention on the global scale, which is why United States - Pre-Federal is in a terrible state right now.
I understand that maybe they don't belong in pre-Federal, because many of them were minted after Statehood. But they do have proper KM numbers and not the token designation, and the reason they were minted was because of a shortage of Federal coins before the San Francisco mint was opened.
I don't know what the answer is. Move them back to pre-Federal or maybe make a new category for United States - Territorial Gold, because just looking through the catalog there are enough issues from the Western states that might support that.
So if it was minted before 1850 for California, or any of the Deseret issues, would be pre-Federal then right? Because it was before they joined the Union.
Citeer: "dptashny"No because KM is America-centric. Numista is meant to be a worldwide catalog.
Okay, I had to laugh because you are saying that on a site that is very French-centric.
I am not exactly sure how KM is American-centric, other than the fact it is printed in English, one of the international business languages, by an American company. I tried to do some searches for the American-centricity of KM but could not find anyone complaining about it, so I would like to know why you think it is so.
There is still the issue of Territorial Gold. Maybe move it to it's own category. But I think pre-Federal maybe needs a different name, because it would imply that it was for areas that are now part of the United States, but before they became part of the Federation of States. You seem to be using the term to mean Colonial coins.
Citeer: "dptashny"No because KM is America-centric. Numista is meant to be a worldwide catalog.
Okay, I had to laugh because you are saying that on a site that is very French-centric.
I am not exactly sure how KM is American-centric, other than the fact it is printed in English, one of the international business languages, by an American company. I tried to do some searches for the American-centricity of KM but could not find anyone complaining about it, so I would like to know why you think it is so.
There is still the issue of Territorial Gold. Maybe move it to it's own category. But I think pre-Federal maybe needs a different name, because it would imply that it was for areas that are now part of the United States, but before they became part of the Federation of States. You seem to be using the term to mean Colonial coins.
+1 to this: I am not a big American collector, but I think I can see a difference between coins struck by states before the United States existed vs. coins struck by not-yet-annexed future states after 1776. The first group is mostly copper, while the second group is mostly gold... separation is also a good way to deal with oddities such as the gold pieces struck by the Mormons, because they spent some years fighting against the federal government and so it's hard to call them "pre-federal Americans".
If anything, "United States - Territories" would be the best title, especially for American coinage that was not issued under the union. Prefederal worked for a while, it was a good choice when we agreed on it, obviously not perfect.
Kenny
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I think California gold (and all similar "coins") should be listed under United States.
United States - Pre-Federal is used by the Red Book, my primary catalog of US coins. "Territories" sounds like a good idea, but I think it's wrong to put the Pre-Federal coins with later gold coinage.
