The Heritage Room in Mossey Library will soon feature a new exhibit of coins from Great Britain.
The coins are from the Alwin C. Carus coin collection, donated to Hillsdale College by coin collector and entrepreneur Alwin C. Carus upon his death in 2005. The exhibit will feature coinage from different eras of British history.
“We have coins from 90 B.C. to A.D. 1992. It’s a really wide range,” said senior Julia Kilgore, Carus coin collection student coordinator.
Kilgore planned and executed the project along with Brenna Henry, technical service librarian and former Carus coin collection coordinator. The display, which will remain in the Heritage Room for the remainder of the semester, will include Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, medieval and modern coins from the British Isles.
Kilgore noted the collection’s rich diversity of coinage from such a relatively small geographical area.
“You can kind of see the development that became such a great major world power,” Kilgore said. “And we have a lot of coins from Great Britain that are just the great of the greats. You have Charles I, James I and Elizabeth II.”
Kilgore believes the Great Britain coin exhibit will interest a wide variety of students studying different disciplines.
“Lots of history majors might be interested. If people are interested in the American Revolution, we have a coin from George III,” she said. “Economics majors might be interested in the silver penny from Alfred the Great’s time that’s been cut in half to make a half-penny. They might want to look into that and think, ‘What happened there?’”
Kilgore said she believes historical artifacts can aid students’ studies.
“When we think of Anglo-Saxon, we think of Beowulf,” she said. “Well, we don’t have a manuscript of Beowulf, but we have coins from that era, something you can actually look at close-up.”
Public Service Librarian Linda Moore agreed.
“I think that the value of the coin collection lies in showing students a tangible evidence of history,” she said. “The exhibit will show in a very real way the extent of an influence of the British Empire.”
Among other artifacts and first editions, the Heritage Room displays a 1776 publication of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and a 1776 edition of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.”
“We have works by John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, John Milton, Tocqueville and Jefferson,” Head Librarian Dan Knoch said. “The Heritage Room’s purpose is to highlight the works that were the foundation of Western Civilization, so that’s why those authors are highlighted in there.”
Kilgore said she hopes students realize the Heritage Room is more than a quiet place to study.
“To a lot of the students, it’s just a room to study in and they don’t realize what kind of cool stuff it has and how they can use it for their research projects,” she said. “I mainly would like to see lots of students there to learn more about the room that they use all the time.”
