Brewing a Revolution: 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. When and why coffee became part of North American daily life is at the center of the recently published book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, by Michelle Craig McDonald. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, McDonald 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.