The Rest of the Story: Where "Money" Comes From (It Doesn't Grow On Trees)

Throughout history, rich and poor alike have endowed their money with a series of expressive nicknames. Centuries of imaginative thought have given us a chance to gripe about how there's never enough clams, dinero, bread, dough, greenbacks, or dead presidents in the bank. While I can't tell you where the money comes from, I can at least tell you where we got the term. Long ago, on one of the seven hills of ancient Rome, there stood a temple called Juno Moneta, or "Juno who warns". Juno was the Roman God of woman and childbirth (in case you were wondering why the young, pregnant protagonist of the 2007 film got her name). She was deemed "Juno who warns" after a flock of noisy geese perched in her temple woke nearby Romans to discover a fire. It just so happened that the Roman mint was located within the temple to Juno, and over time the mint came to be referenced as "ad Monetum" or "at the temple of (Juno) Moneta)". It followed that the coins the mint produced were nicknamed "moneta." The term endured ages of linguistic childbearing in the Romance Language Family to survive in Spanish (moneda), French (monnaie), Italian (moneta), and even in our Germanic English as the term we know, love and can't seem to stop talking about.

<- Roman denarius featuring the image of Juno and the phrase "Moneta"

History Can Be Fun?

I hated history class until I graduated and started reading about it at my own discretion. There was no pressure to memorize timelines, no need to limit myself to the great dates, names and events that constitute academia. I began to see the world as an infinite stage, occupied at different acts in time by a different cast of characters. For every great figure or watershed event, there were thousands of humble witnesses - people who, despite their very different stations in life, had been born with the same basic thoughts and aspirations as I.

I began to discover joy in the little-known facts of history, things that were never deemed important enough to be part of college textbooks but seemed to matter more than the things that were. Rather than see history as a litany of numbers, or through the lens of some contemporary scholar's doctoral thesis, I yearned for the personal, human side of this great story. What did it mean to live an ordinary life in the passing of these extraordinary events?

Here you will find the history of ordinary things, the words you use every day or the common practices you take for granted. You'll laugh or cringe at the bizarre things that your ancestors once considered fairly obvious or mundane. My hope is that you will share my joy in measuring history in days, rather than eras, and experiences rather than legacies. You may even begin tosee your own perspective as being both insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but essential to the grand experience of it all.

The Rest of the Story

Where "Money" Comes From (It Doesn't Grow On Trees)

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History Can Be Fun?

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