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Maya Angelou and Sally Ride Will Be First Women on U.S. Quarters Coming in 2022

Susan B. Anthony dollar or the Sacagawea dollar (which largely replaced it). If you've payed close attention to American coinage, you may have also spotted Helen Keller on the Alabama State Quarter. However, these are the only three women on American coins—or on any American legal tender produced today. Thankfully, the American Women Quarters Program is set to change that. The program will create 20 new quarter designs featuring pioneering American women of the past. The quarters will be released by the U.S. Mint in stages over the next four years.

The American Women Quarters Program will run from 2022 to 2025, with five new quarters released nationwide each year. Two of the famous faces to be seen in 2022 have already been announced, although their designs are still in a preliminary phase. The legendary women to be honored are Maya Angelou and Sally Ride. A poet and civil rights activist, Dr. Angelou passed away in 2014. She was a prolific writer best known for her work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010. Imagery from this work appears in the preliminary design of her quarter. Over her lifetime, Angelou received over 50 honorary degrees and even spoke at President Clinton's 1993 Inauguration.

Astronaut Sally Ride will be representing women in STEM on a 2022 quarter. Dr. Ride held a PhD in physics from Stanford University. She was a member of the first NASA class of astronauts to select women in 1978. In 1983, she became the first American woman in space (and third woman globally) on a flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. To this day, she remains the youngest American astronaut to have been to space at 32 years old. She is also the earliest astronaut recognized as LGBTQ+. Ride has also been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her quarter will feature references to her time in space.

The women to be featured will include individuals of diverse backgrounds and contributions to American society. All honorees must be deceased. Though only two of the 20 women to be honored have so far been announced by the U.S. Mint, there is a google form to submit your recommendations for the other 18 to be considered by Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, alongside representatives from the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Initiative, the National Women’s History Museum, and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus.

As exciting a development as it is, many women and communities of color are left wondering where they are to be found among depictions on American legal tender. While some women did appear on antique bills before the founding of the modern national mint system, at present, no woman or person of color appears on modern American paper currency. An exciting decision to place Harriet Tubman on the $10 bill was announced in 2015 as part of a movement by the Treasury to include a handful of pioneering American women on paper money. However, this plan was amended to the $20 bill after the success of Hamilton, the musical about the current face of the $10 bill. The plan—which was supposed to go into effect in 2020—was then pushed to 2028 by the Trump administration in a decision believed to be in part due to the former president's well-documented love of Andrew Jackson (who appears on the bill). The move frustrated many, as Tubman was to be the first woman and Black American honored with a depiction on current paper currency—replacing the slaveholding Jackson.

To submit your ideas for the American Women Quarters Program, use this form. To stay up to date on the fight for representation and the honoring of the achievements of women and communities of color, check out the organization WomenOn20s.

20 pioneering American women of diverse backgrounds will be featured on nationwide U.S. Mint quarters through the American Women Quarters Program.

Silver coins unearthed in New England may be loot from one of the 'greatest crimes in history'

A handful of Arabian silver coins found in New England may be the last surviving relics of history's most notorious act of piracy — and perhaps one of the most famous pirates who ever lived.

Evidence suggests the distinctive coins were spent as common silver in the American colonies in the late 1690s by the fugitive pirate crew of Henry Every, also known as John Avery, who had fled there after plundering the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-sawai as it was returning pilgrims from the Muslim Hajj.

Researchers aren't certain that the coins are from the Ganj-i-sawai, but their origin, their dates and their discovery in such a distant region suggest they were seized by the pirates and spent in the Americas.

Their discovery has also cast new light on Every's whereabouts shortly before he vanished with his loot. "We can prove beyond a doubt that he actually was in the mainland American colonies," Rhode Island metal detectorist Jim Bailey told Live Science.

Bailey found one of the first of the Arabian silver coins, called a comassee, in 2014 at the site of a colonial settlement on Aquidneck Island, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Providence.

More than a dozen similar coins thought to be from the pirate raid on the Ganj-i-sawai have now been discovered by metal detectorists and archaeologists elsewhere in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts, Connecticut and North Carolina — maybe the last evidence of one of the greatest crimes in history.

Pirate attack
In 1695, Every and his cutthroat crew on board their ship Fancy joined a pirate raid on a convoy in the Red Sea that was returning to India from Mecca.

Every's ship chased and caught the convoy's flagship, the Ganj-i-sawai, which belonged to the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb, the Muslim emperor of what is now India and Pakistan. Reports say the pirates tortured and killed its crew and 600 passengers, before making off with gold and silver, including thousands of coins, said to be worth between 200,000 and 600,000 British pounds — the equivalent of between $40 million and $130 million in today's money.

After an outcry led by the British East India Company, whose profits on the riches of India were threatened by the raid, Britain's King William III ordered what is regarded as the first international manhunt to capture Every and the other pirates.

By this time, however, Every and his crew had escaped to the New World. They lived for several months in the Bahamas, possibly with the collusion of the British governor of the islands; but they fled in late 1696 as the Royal Navy closed in.

Some of Every's crew went to live in the mainland colonies, where they were eventually tried and acquitted, possibly as a result of bribery; but there were no further sightings of Every. Later reports suggested he had sailed to Ireland while still on the run and that he died there, impoverished, a few years later. Since his loot from the Ganj-i-sawai was never accounted for, rumors long persisted that the treasure had been buried somewhere in secret.

Arabian silver
Bailey is an amateur archaeologist who worked on the recovery of the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship discovered off Cape Cod in 1984.

Related: The most notorious pirates ever

In 2014, his metal detector picked up the first of the mysterious coins in a meadow on Aquidneck Island that was once the site of a colonial township.

"You never field-clean a coin, because you could damage it," he said. "I had to run to my car and get a big bottle of water… the mud came off, and I saw this Arabic script on the coin and I was amazed, because I knew exactly where it'd come from," he said. "I was aware that the American colonies had been bases of operation for piracy in the late 17th century."

Studies of the Arabic writing on the coin showed it had been minted in Yemen in southern Arabia in 1693, just a few years before the pirate attack on the Ganj-i-sawai. Another 13 have been found, mostly by metal detectorists, but the latest in 2018 by archaeologists in Connecticut; two Ottoman Turkish silver coins thought to be from the same hoard have also been unearthed in the region.

Bailey has carefully studied each of the discoveries, while researching historical sources about the pirates who might have brought the coins to the Americas; and in 2017, some of his work was published in the Colonial Newsletter, a research journal published by the American Numismatic Society.

Several of the coins show the year they were minted, while some are marked with the names of rulers at the time, which can be used to date them. "None of the coins date after 1695, when the Ganj-i-sawai was captured," Bailey said.

Pirate treasure
Every is thought to have sailed directly to Ireland after his time in the Bahamas, but Bailey's research suggests Every first spent several weeks on the American mainland, trading in African slaves he had bought with the loot from the Ganj-i-sawai.

Historical records relate that a ship Every had acquired in the Bahamas, Sea Flower, sold dozens of slaves on the mainland, and Bailey's research suggests that Every was on board, he said.

Bailey thinks Every probably died in Ireland eventually, as described by some chroniclers. But others portrayed him as a swashbuckling "king" who ruled for years over a fictional pirate utopia in Madagascar.

There's no way to know if Every handled the New England coins himself, but Bailey thinks they were almost certainly part of the hoard looted from the Mughal ship (Some coin specialists, however, are not convinced by his theory.)

While most of the loot was probably melted down to hide the origins, "what we're finding basically are the coins that were being used by the pirates when they were on the run: coins for lodgings, coins for meals, coins for drinking," he said.

Astonishingly, the coins may also have been referred to in the manhunt proclamation by King William, which stated that Every and the other fugitives had looted many "Indian and Persian" gold and silver coins from the captured ship.

"How often do you find a coin that's mentioned in the proclamation for the capture of a pirate and the subject of the first worldwide manhunt?" Bailey said. "It's just fantastic."

Originally published on Live Science.

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