Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States

Michelle Craig McDonald takes us inside the fascinating history of one of the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide: coffee. The beverage that millions of people drink every day is so popular that it is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history.  In this hybrid program, McDonald uses her new book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States (2025), to show when and why coffee become part of North American’s daily life. 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.