427 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Free and open to the public. RSVP to attend in person or virtually.
Join us on June 5, 2025 to celebrate the publication of Director of the APS's Library & Museum Michelle McDonald's book Coffee Nation: How One Commodity 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 become part of North American daily life is at the center of Coffee Nation. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, Michelle Craig 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.