The term silver dollar can be misleading. While the metal silver is used, the whole term actually generally refers to any large white metal coin, with a face value of one dollar, issued by the United States of America. Several purists have expressed their concern about and protest against the term, insisting that a dollar should not be called silver unless it really contains some, if not all, of the metal in question. Still, the term silver dollar lives on to pertain to coins with one-dollar values.

Beginning the twentieth century, dollar coins or silver dollars have found a significant decrease in popular acceptance in circulation in the United States of America. Since 1971, there have been many attempts to revive the silver dollars place as legal tender, with suggestions to phase in a coin to replace the one dollar bill, but all have proved futile. Other developed countries, on the other hand, still have denominations of like value exist only in coin. For example, there are the British 50 pence coin, the Canadian loonie and toonie, the 1 and 2 Australian dollar coins, the 50 New Taiwan dollar coin, the 1 and 2 Euro coins, and the 100 and 500 Japanese yen coin, to name a few; the silver dollar values still exist in these countries.

Before dollar coins or silver dollars were born, paper currency was first tried out by a then fledgling United States. However, this form of money did not last long and in 1776, the Continental Congress approved and carried out plans for the production of silver coins to replace the quickly failing Continental, which is what the fledgling country called its paper currency. Unfortunately, silver coins were never actually produced at the time, owing to the Revolutionary War which was taking place. Thomas Jefferson, influenced by the failure of the Continental and the overall distrust in paper currency that was widespread during the period, wrote letters indicating his desire for the United States to mint coins that have similar value with and worth to contemporary foreign coins. Indeed, such is the clamor for coins and silver dollar values.

The United States Mint, officially authorized by the Coinage Act of 1792 to produce dollar coins from silver, produced silver dollar coins from the year 1794 continuously until 1803, when the robust silver dollar production were stopped until 1836. Mint Director David Rittenhouse, distributed the first silver dollars, which were 1,758 all in all, as souvenirs to the dignitaries at that time. Today, coin collectors from around the world highly prized original silver dollars made during the said period, including the Flowing Hair (1794-1795) and the Draped Bust (1795-1804), of which there are two varieties, namely the small eagle (1795-1798) and the heraldic eagle (1798-1804). Some of these silver dollar values are extremely rare and exceptionally valuable, especially because they are the earliest examples of massively circulated coins ever struck by the United States Mint, thus bearing an incomparable mystique for serious coin collectors worldwide.