Kentucky governor Andy Beshear has commissioned award-winning numismatic author, lecturer, and researcher Michael F. Moran as a Kentucky Colonel, a distinction recognized as the highest honor awarded by the Commonwealth. The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels defines such a commission as “recognition of an individual’s noteworthy accomplishments and outstanding service to our community, state, and nation.”

Professionally, Moran is a managing partner of Valley Lumber, a major building-products supplier based in Colorado. Among his charitable and community activities, Moran is former chair of the advisory board of the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, and he has served as treasurer, trustee, and executive committee member of the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

On the federal level, he is currently in his third four-year term on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. As a senior member, Moran serves as an informed, experienced, and impartial resource to the Treasury secretary, representing the interests of American citizens. Most recently, he served on a subcommittee advising the United States Mint on themes for circulating coinage celebrating the nation’s 2026 semiquincentennial.

Moran has authored two books published by Whitman Publishing, with a third in production and expected to debut in 2025. His groundbreaking 480-page masterwork, Striking Change: The Great Artistic Collaboration of Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (2008), studies one of the most dramatic and productive relationships in American numismatics. It explores the renaissance of United States coinage at the beginning of the 20th century. His next book, 1849: The Philadelphia Mint Strikes Gold (2018), won the Numismatic Literary Guild’s “Best Specialized Book” award for U.S. coinage. It chronicles the trials and tribulations of the U.S. Mint in the first half of the 19th century and the tremendous impact that the 1848 discovery of gold in California had upon that institution and the nation as a whole.

One of Moran’s greatest contributions to numismatics is the 1921 Silver Dollar Anniversary Act. Over the course of two years, he and current ANA president Thomas Uram worked toward legislative success with Congressman Andy Barr of Kentucky and Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming. They wrote, lobbied for, and ultimately secured passage of the act, which was signed into law on Jan. 5, 2021. The legislation ordered minting of new coins celebrating the 1921–2021 centennial of the last mintage of classic Morgan dollars and the first year of the Peace dollar. This program has introduced a new generation of Americans to two of the nation’s most popular classic coins. Millions of the new silver dollars, recreating the old designs and eagerly sought by collectors, have been produced frequently since 2021.

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