Brewing a Revolution: How Coffee Transformed the Early United States

Michelle Craig McDonald, librarian and director of the library and museum at the American Philosophical Society, talks about how coffee transformed the early United States. Coffee is among the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide, and so omnipresent its popularity is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history. Join us in person or via Zoom (see above).

When and why coffee became part of North American daily life is at the center of McDonald's recently published book, "Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States." Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, she follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.

The William L. Clements Library; the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center; and the U.S. at 250 program invite you to join this second lecture in a three-part series titled "Drinking the Revolution," exploring the role of beverages in Revolutionary America and the Early Republic.