NICARAGUA 5 centavos 1937

Description

Scarce in high grade.

Nicaragua is the largest and most ethnically diverse Central American country. It had no gold or silver, so the Spanish government neglected it. It was part of the Mexican Empire from 1821 to 1823, then a constuent of the Central American Republic, which it left in 1838. Plaything of dictators for most of its independent history, it was the object of invasion by the American William Walker. Such private military ventures were then called “filibusters.” The neighboring countries united to drive out Walker. Then they set up another dictatorship.

Because Eurasia is one big thing large masses of people have sloshed bloodily back and forth for thousands of years. But because of the geological choke point that is now Panama such migrations can’t happen between North and South America, and they are essentially two different places. Whatever nation controls the choke point has the upper hand in the Western hemisphere.

The North America category: the big three, the Central American nations, and a bunch of island nations and other political entities in the Caribbean Sea. Greenland we’re putting with Europe. By that criterion we should put Martinique and Aruba with Europe too, but we’re not. I’m not even sure why. Doesn’t matter anyway. Almost all of you are searching for modern coins by country, not by region.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.