The United States ten-dollar bill ($10) is a denomination of United States currency. The first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, is currently featured on the obverse of the bill, while the U.S. Treasury is featured on the reverse. (Hamilton is one of two non-presidents featured on currently issued U.S. bills. The other is Benjamin Franklin, on the $100 bill. In addition to this, Hamilton is one of only two persons featured on U.S. currency who was not born in the continental United States, as he was from the West Indies. The other, Kamehameha I, appears on the 2008 Hawaii state quarter.) All $10 bills issued today are Federal Reserve Notes.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing says the average life of a $10 bill in circulation is 18 months before it is replaced due to wear. Approximately 6% of all US banknotes printed in 2009 were $10 bills. Ten dollar bills are delivered by Federal Reserve Banks in yellow straps.
The source of the face on the $10 bill is John Trumbull’s 1805 portrait of Hamilton that belongs to the portrait collection of New York City Hall. The $10 bill is the only U.S. paper currency in circulation in which the portrait faces to the left (the $100,000 bill featured a portrait of Woodrow Wilson facing to the left, but was used only for intra-government transactions).
Read more about United States Ten-dollar Bill: Large Size Note History, Small Size Note History, Nicknames
Famous quotes containing the words ten-dollar bill, united states, united, states, ten-dollar and/or bill:
“You must think I am a high-priced man.... Fifteen dollars is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for fifteen dollars, and return to you a ten-dollar bill.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The measure discriminates definitely against products which make up what has been universally considered a program of safe farming. The bill upholds as ideals of American farming the men who grow cotton, corn, rice, swine, tobacco, or wheat and nothing else. These are to be given special favors at the expense of the farmer who has toiled for years to build up a constructive farming enterprise to include a variety of crops and livestock.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)