I will qualify my answer saying that the way I view coins is to flip it up, and in this way it is sort of upside down but appears correctly. As James said most coinage is this way. If you simply rotate it sideways, it will appear upside down.
It was originally done this way to identify the difference between coins of value (head-to-toe orientation) and that of military medals (which have a head-to-head orientation). After awhile, it was kept that way as a tradition. This is called a “coin turn,” and it is simply traditional for US coinage.