NNP

Howland Wood served as Curator of the American Numismatic Society from 1913 to 1938 and in that capacity sent and received thousands of letters, which have now been digitized under sponsorship of Newman Portal. This series consists of nearly 3,000 individual correspondent files, with scanning by Internet Archive associate Lara Jacobs launched in late 2023 and recently completed.

One of the final files is that of Mario Zucchi (1872-1949) of the Royal Library in Turin, Italy. In this correspondence, Wood requests plasters of ancient coins of Metapontum and later acknowledges receipt of the same. The Zucchi plasters are presumably no longer in the ANS collection or are uncataloged. The ANS online catalog, MANTIS, reports 520 results on the search term “Metapontum,” but a successive search on the words “plaster” or “cast” reveals no hits. 

Most examples of the Metapontum coinage depict barley or grain. The ear of barley was a symbol of this Greek city-state in Magna Graecia (southern Italy) that represented the city's agricultural wealth and reminded trading partners of its abundance. The file concludes with a request to host ANS President Edward T. Newell during his anticipated trip to Turin in spring 1922.

Link to Howland Wood curator correspondence: https://archive.org/details/americannumismaticsociety?tab=collection&query=%22howland+wood+correspondence%22&sort=title
Link to Mario Zucchi correspondence: https://archive.org/details/zucchimariocav1900amer/page/7/mode/1up

The Wayback Machine is the most significant collection of archived web pages on the Internet, with a current collection size of 916 billion web pages. Wayback Machine content is frequently accessed by journalists and historians wishing to verify what did, or did not, exist on a certain web page at a certain point in time. Pages from the Wayback Machine have been accepted in courts as a non-partial historical record, and the research value of this archive is hard to overstate. 

Under sponsorship of the Newman Portal, the Wayback Machine has archived nearly a thousand numismatic websites, with additional sites being constantly added. More than a few of these sites have in time gone defunct, meaning that this is the only record of the site that is accessible to the general public. The archive is not completely comprehensive, meaning that not every page of every site is saved. However, users will always find top-level pages in addition to substantial subsidiary content. 

This Newman Portal collection on the Wayback Machine was launched in 2018 and to date has collected 35 million web pages, representing nearly three terabytes of data. Note, this data is not incorporated into Newman Portal itself but may be searched separately via the Newman Portal collection page on the Wayback Machine site. Wayne Homren has recently created useful search facets, available in the left column, that can be used to narrow search results to topical groups of web pages (for example, tokens, medals, paper money, etc.). 

A sample search on the term “Rittenhouse” delivers David Rittenhouse biographies (the first U.S. Mint Director), accounts of the Rittenhouse medal that is awarded annually by the U.S. Mint, press releases regarding the so-called Rittenhouse 1792 half disme (currently on exhibit at the ANA), and Dick Johnson’s account of the Rittenhouse Society medal presented to Eric P. Newman in 2011. Scrolling through the search results further reveals David Finkelstein’s comments on his article in the September 2017 Numismatist, regarding the David Rittenhouse deposit used to coin the 1794 silver dollars.

Note, page retrieval times may be on the order of ten seconds or more, no doubt a consequence of the gargantuan data store, nearly a trillion pages. On the flip side, the immense size of the collection is precisely its strength. This archive will be especially useful when searching for content of recent origin, particularly content that has never reached print. Not every site is ideal for resolving every question, but numismatic researchers will do well to add this resource to their arsenal. We welcome feedback at NNPCurator@wustl.edu.

Link to the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org
Link to NNP collection on the Wayback Machine: https://archive-it.org/collections/9633