Dec. 1, 2025
An American History of Coffee
Americans love their coffee; according to the Fall 2025 National Coffee Data Trends Report, 66% of adult Americans drink coffee every day, averaging three cups per day. This devotion to the caffeinated beverage is nothing new. Even before Bostonians dumped over 90,000 pounds of tea in the harbor, Americans were sipping cups of joe. George and Martha Washington served tea at the President’s House in New York, and after he stepped down as president, George Washington even tried growing coffee trees at Mount Vernon. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Michelle Craig McDonald, Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society, and author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night,” by Gus Arnheim, 1934, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The episode image is of a coffee pot, made by Robert and William Peaston and accompanying sugar bowl, creampot, and tongs, made by Myer Myers; the items were owned by Dorothy Remsen, who married Abraham Brinckerhoff of New York in 1772. The coffee set is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 704; and the image is available as part of the Met's Open Access policy.
Additional Sources:
- “Coffee’s Creation Myth: How Coffee Conquered the World,” by Blake Stilwell, Coffee or Die Magazine, April 16, 2022.
- “The Boston Tea Party at 250: History steeped in myth,” by Gabrielle Emanuel, WBUR, December 14, 2024.
- “Coffee and the White House,” by Tianna Mobley, The White House Historical Association, May 2, 2022.
- “Coffee,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
- “Coffee: World Markets and Trade,” by United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service, December 2024.
- “Poll reveals America’s coffee consumption habits,” by Georgia Smith, Global Coffee Report, September 11, 2025.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:08.820
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
00:09.720 --> 00:12.543
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
00:12.563 --> 00:19.430
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
00:20.591 --> 00:27.658
[SPEAKER_02]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never
00:27.638 --> 00:32.847
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.
00:37.715 --> 00:45.629
[SPEAKER_02]: As legend would have it, sometime in perhaps the ninth century, an Ethiopian goat herder named Caldi.
00:46.531 --> 00:53.022
[SPEAKER_02]: Found his missing goats dancing all night after eating the berries of a small
00:54.200 --> 00:58.024
[SPEAKER_02]: Caldi himself tried the berries and felt a rush of energy.
00:58.044 --> 01:07.214
[SPEAKER_02]: He then introduced these berries to nearby monks, who threw them into the fire, fearing them the work of the devil.
01:07.254 --> 01:20.848
[SPEAKER_02]: The smell of the roasting berries, though, was so enticing that they pulled them out to make the world's
01:21.402 --> 01:30.535
[SPEAKER_02]: coffee did originate in Ethiopia, and was being traded throughout Africa in the Middle East by the 15th century.
01:32.518 --> 01:45.857
[SPEAKER_02]: By the 18th century, European demand for coffee was so great that the Dutch and the British were both experimenting with growing coffee trees in their American colonies.
01:47.356 --> 01:59.592
[SPEAKER_02]: an attempt by the governor of Barbados to make the island a hub of coffee production failed, in part because Barbados was so dominated by sugar plantations.
02:00.614 --> 02:06.942
[SPEAKER_02]: But even more because Barbados didn't have the elevation needed to grow coffee trees.
02:09.185 --> 02:15.574
[SPEAKER_02]: That mountainous train was found instead
02:16.718 --> 02:23.647
[SPEAKER_02]: where the former governor, Sir Nicholas Laws, planted the island's first coffee trees.
02:25.249 --> 02:46.017
[SPEAKER_02]: At Laws' urging, the British House of Commons passed in 1732, an act for encouraging the growth of coffee in his Majesty's Plantations in America, which reduced the import duties on coffee grown
02:46.418 --> 03:02.135
[SPEAKER_02]: as opposed to foreign coffee, several of the islands ceded to the British by the French in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, were likewise well-suited for growing coffee.
03:05.759 --> 03:13.067
[SPEAKER_02]: From Jamaica and the rest of the British West Indies,
03:14.819 --> 03:27.358
[SPEAKER_02]: By the early 1770s, at least a third of the coffee imported into British North America, and sometimes as much as half, came through Philadelphia.
03:27.378 --> 03:31.163
[SPEAKER_02]: That trade grew quickly.
03:31.184 --> 03:38.194
[SPEAKER_02]: More than doubling between 1768 and 1773,
03:38.275 --> 03:46.905
[SPEAKER_02]: When 288,632 pounds of coffee was imported from Jamaica to Philadelphia.
03:46.965 --> 04:02.663
[SPEAKER_02]: Some North Americans sourced coffee from elsewhere in the world, but the favorable taxes for coffee from the British colonies made other coffee significantly more expensive by comparison.
04:06.085 --> 04:20.463
[SPEAKER_02]: Three of the mid-18th century, most North Americans were using imported coffee pots, which at 25 to 40 ounces were significantly larger than tea pots.
04:22.446 --> 04:35.923
[SPEAKER_02]: The coffee itself was brewed in a kettle and then transferred to the coffee pot, which was tall and thin with the spout near the top, so as to avoid pouring out the grounds.
04:37.743 --> 04:49.142
[SPEAKER_02]: Coffee Pots were made from a range of materials, from porcelain and ceramic to metals, including silver for the wealthiest coffee drinkers.
04:51.145 --> 05:02.805
[SPEAKER_02]: Paul Revere, best known for his midnight ride, was a Boston Silver Smith, who made a dozen coffee pots in the decade and a half before the American Revolution.
05:03.899 --> 05:13.072
[SPEAKER_02]: including one as a part of a wedding set for William Pean, that took 45 ounces of sterling silver to create.
05:15.516 --> 05:28.455
[SPEAKER_02]: After the December 1773 Tea Party, when Bostonians destroyed over 90,000 pounds of tea, worth over 1.5 million in today's dollars.
05:29.363 --> 05:40.077
[SPEAKER_02]: The British Parliament passed four acts that they called the coercive acts, but which the American colonists refer to as the intolerable acts.
05:41.939 --> 05:58.240
[SPEAKER_02]: In reaction to these acts, which limited the autonomy of British North American colonies, especially Massachusetts, the continental Congress formed.
05:58.355 --> 06:09.851
[SPEAKER_02]: and then expanded to an embargo on all goods from Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies, which, of course, included coffee.
06:09.891 --> 06:19.103
[SPEAKER_02]: Americans never stopped drinking coffee, but it became harder to come by during the war.
06:20.585 --> 06:25.712
[SPEAKER_02]: With one source of it being the capture of ships sailing under British flags,
06:27.802 --> 06:33.333
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the colonies set the price of coffee, along with other goods during the war.
06:33.393 --> 06:46.941
[SPEAKER_02]: Since coffee could be stored for long periods of time, unlike many other foods, retailers would store their coffee to wait for a favorable pricing situation.
06:49.283 --> 07:00.178
[SPEAKER_02]: After Congress signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France in 1778, the French West Indies opened to American trading.
07:00.218 --> 07:11.513
[SPEAKER_02]: And by 1781, 93% of coffee imported into the United States came from the French Caribbean.
07:11.533 --> 07:18.362
[SPEAKER_02]: Accordingly, coffee prices returned to pre-revolutionary levels.
07:20.553 --> 07:25.141
[SPEAKER_02]: In the next half century, though, Americans would find a new source of coffee.
07:26.944 --> 07:47.337
[SPEAKER_02]: In the 1830s, the U.S. Congress repealed the tariff on foreign coffee, since there were no sources of coffee in the continental U.S. At the same time, Brazil began to invest in coffee production,
07:49.004 --> 07:55.074
[SPEAKER_02]: A year later, Brazilian coffee made up over 60% of US coffee imports.
07:56.857 --> 08:03.568
[SPEAKER_02]: As of December 2024, Brazil remained the top supplier of coffee to the United States.
08:04.450 --> 08:09.358
[SPEAKER_02]: A 32% of American coffee being imported from Brazil.
08:12.173 --> 08:25.675
[SPEAKER_02]: According to the Fall 2025 National Coffee Data Trends Report, 66% of adult Americans drink coffee every day, averaging three cups a day.
08:25.695 --> 08:33.388
[SPEAKER_02]: As Bill Murray, CEO and President of the National Coffee Association noted,
08:34.162 --> 08:41.737
[SPEAKER_02]: Quote, coffee's staying power as a beloved touchstone in Americans' daily lives is remarkable.
08:41.757 --> 08:50.494
[SPEAKER_02]: And its contributions to our health and our economy give Americans even more grounds for celebration.
08:50.554 --> 08:55.343
[SPEAKER_02]: This national coffee day and every day, unwoot.
08:57.044 --> 09:16.420
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Michelle Craig McDonald, director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, and to author of Coffee Nation, how one commodity transformed the early United States.
09:20.534 --> 09:24.779
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got a mission, it's just a simple thing.
09:25.340 --> 09:28.523
[SPEAKER_03]: I've only one ambition to have the right to bring you.
09:28.563 --> 09:35.291
[SPEAKER_03]: You're coffee in the morning and kisses in the night.
09:36.412 --> 09:43.521
[SPEAKER_03]: It's my desire to do as I am told to have what you require and never have it told you.
09:43.541 --> 09:48.887
[SPEAKER_03]: You're coffee in the morning and kisses in the night.
09:50.470 --> 09:52.514
[SPEAKER_02]: Michelle, thanks so much for joining me today.
09:52.554 --> 09:54.978
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me on the show.
09:54.998 --> 09:55.679
[SPEAKER_02]: I appreciate it.
09:56.981 --> 10:06.698
[SPEAKER_02]: I am a little bit obsessed with coffee, have been addicted for many many decades now, so it's really exciting to read about some about the history of coffee.
10:06.738 --> 10:11.466
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm wondering what got you interested initially into this research.
10:12.408 --> 10:22.706
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in addition to Ion, desperate love of the drink, it was, I will say it was a, it was a topic that I came upon almost by accident when I started graduate school.
10:22.787 --> 10:27.315
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was a number of years ago, for the listeners who can't see me, I now have white hair.
10:27.775 --> 10:30.841
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was the confluence of two classes.
10:31.502 --> 10:37.032
[SPEAKER_01]: So I took a class in early modern British history, and I was, at that time, I thought
10:37.012 --> 10:43.864
[SPEAKER_01]: I had applied to graduate school to say I was going to study the emergence of public education after the Civil War in the United States.
10:43.924 --> 10:50.115
[SPEAKER_01]: That is clearly not what I chose to study, but I was still really interested in ideas about literacy.
10:50.295 --> 10:55.665
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I thought I would look at places where people can get their information if they couldn't read or write.
10:56.366 --> 10:58.530
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was focusing on
10:58.510 --> 11:11.251
[SPEAKER_01]: ines and taverns and especially copy houses where a news and events were frequently discussed out loud, discussed in groups and so that was the first thing that sort of caught my eye in the coffee realm.
11:12.073 --> 11:22.510
[SPEAKER_01]: The next semester I took a class on Atlantic World history which looks at how the Americas and Africa and Europe are tied together and I thought well I can't
11:22.490 --> 11:30.348
[SPEAKER_01]: look at copy houses again, but I can look at copy plantations and see what I could learn about how coffee was grown and how it was distributed.
11:30.989 --> 11:40.009
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I realized in these two classes is that there was one really interesting set of books that were looking at the history of copy houses mostly in Western Europe.
11:39.989 --> 12:01.980
[SPEAKER_01]: But for then, the copy just sort of showed up ready to be consumed and then in books about copy plantations and they were far fewer, really for the 18th century, most of the book is whose own sugar, but where I could find references to copy, they end pretty much of the port of the island or the colony ready to be exported, but these books weren't talking to each other.
12:01.960 --> 12:15.780
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's where the idea for this project came about, a history that looked at how and when coffee came to the Americas, how it was grown, how it was traded, and ultimately how it was consumed, how it was drawn quite a people who came to love it.
12:16.701 --> 12:20.266
[SPEAKER_02]: And what are some of the sources that you're able to look at?
12:20.346 --> 12:26.435
[SPEAKER_02]: I assume if you go into like a newspaper's dot com and type coffee, you're going to get way too many results to be useful.
12:26.515 --> 12:30.280
[SPEAKER_02]: So how did you go about figuring out what to look at?
12:30.732 --> 12:32.614
[SPEAKER_01]: appetizers are helpful, but you're right.
12:32.694 --> 12:37.320
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to have parameters because there's a lot of them, especially as we get closer to the 19th century.
12:37.820 --> 12:39.482
[SPEAKER_01]: But I used a range of sources.
12:39.643 --> 12:43.587
[SPEAKER_01]: I lived in Jamaica for about a year and a half to do research there.
12:43.687 --> 12:47.772
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in that place, I was looking at plantation records.
12:47.932 --> 12:56.082
[SPEAKER_01]: I was looking at whales and probative stories to get a sense and naps to get a sense
12:56.062 --> 12:57.724
[SPEAKER_01]: What kinds of people own them?
12:57.784 --> 13:01.228
[SPEAKER_01]: What sorts of labor was used to grow coffee?
13:01.749 --> 13:17.749
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when I moved into the trading section and spending a lot more time with customs papers and with naval office shipping lists and with merchants' account books to get a sense of when coffee is shipped and where coffee is shipped and in what quantities?
13:17.729 --> 13:32.458
[SPEAKER_01]: and then for the consumer side of the story I spent a fair bit of time definitely with advertisements but also in letters and diaries because it's one thing to know that people are drinking coffee but that's not the same as knowing why they're drinking coffee.
13:33.079 --> 13:38.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was interested in all of those questions and then finally I would be remiss.
13:38.249 --> 14:02.126
[SPEAKER_01]: If I didn't add that I had a before I became a historian I had a career for about eight years in museums as a curator and educator and for me material culture is still really powerful as a resource face and so I spent a lot of time looking at coffee pots and coffee cups and coffee grinders, coffee spoons, everything that's related to how you prepare coffee and how you serve coffee.
14:02.146 --> 14:06.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of those are the kinds of research resources I was interested in.
14:06.953 --> 14:14.753
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one of my favorite tidbits in the book was that the first coffee grinder to come to what's now the U.S. was on the Mayflower.
14:15.762 --> 14:28.894
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was trying to find as many tough stones as I can and when I found that mortar and pestle for grinding coffee and it's not surprising actually because many of these religious refugees were coming through Amsterdam and Holland actually became very interested.
14:28.934 --> 14:32.337
[SPEAKER_01]: The dust became very interested in property trading in the 17th century.
14:32.357 --> 14:45.769
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I thought the more I can link it to the Nape flower or to James Town, there's another reference to those who are living in James Town as well.
14:45.749 --> 15:03.640
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk a little bit about the way that coffee is grown and it's so striking that you're focused on the Americas, especially what becomes the U.S. and within the whole British colonies of North America, you cannot grow coffee.
15:03.620 --> 15:05.403
[SPEAKER_02]: How is coffee grown?
15:05.443 --> 15:13.134
[SPEAKER_02]: How is it different than the way sugar, for instance, which is also often a tropical product is is grown as maintained.
15:13.474 --> 15:15.818
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are some similarities and there are some differences.
15:15.838 --> 15:23.048
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are two commodities that they do grow up, you know, adjacent to each other, but there are some important distances to and the first one is timing.
15:23.429 --> 15:27.214
[SPEAKER_01]: So sugar comes over to the Caribbean through
15:27.194 --> 15:33.541
[SPEAKER_01]: British inferior channels, but also through French and Dutch and Spanish, all European empires are interested in sugar.
15:34.102 --> 15:36.104
[SPEAKER_01]: But it comes over earlier in the 17th century.
15:36.145 --> 15:41.691
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is a one-tastically profitable industry.
15:41.711 --> 15:48.399
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the reasons why it's gotten I think so much attention from historians as opposed to other commodities that were grown in the West Indies.
15:49.180 --> 15:51.042
[SPEAKER_01]: But it favors
15:51.022 --> 16:03.881
[SPEAKER_01]: low-lying regions, so coastal regions for the most part in Caribbean colonies, and it needs a lot of sun, it needs a lot of rain, and it processes, it requires being processed very quickly.
16:04.362 --> 16:15.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Once sugar canus cut, you've opened a time window, in which it needs to be processed, or it will begin to ferment, and once that happens, you can't use it to produce raw or refine sugar.
16:15.541 --> 16:17.485
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a 17th century story.
16:17.505 --> 16:26.902
[SPEAKER_01]: It has huge implications for the Caribbean and the people of the Caribbean because sugar is grown pretty much exclusively by enslaved labor.
16:27.363 --> 16:35.659
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the genesis of the transatlantic slave trade that repopulates the West Indies and the legacies of which you can still see today.
16:35.639 --> 16:41.066
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is a story that I think has been beautifully captured by many really strong histories.
16:41.627 --> 16:47.535
[SPEAKER_01]: Copy is similar in the sense that it is reliant on enslaved labor as well, but it comes later.
16:47.595 --> 16:55.426
[SPEAKER_01]: It arrives in the early 18th century in the 1720s, and it requires very different circumstances requiring.
16:55.867 --> 17:03.317
[SPEAKER_01]: So Copy grows best at about 2,000 feet above sea level, even better still,
17:03.297 --> 17:20.850
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they're you're looking at places in the Caribbean that have not ranges and there are a lot because these are many of these are legacies of volcanic islands So places like Jamaica or sentiment which is now hay or the Dominican Republic, which at that point was sent out of Mingo or Spanish colony
17:20.830 --> 17:27.321
[SPEAKER_01]: Cuba, many of the eastern, the smaller anteles, those have mountainous elevations, or coffee grows well.
17:27.682 --> 17:29.745
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're not going to see it in other places.
17:29.846 --> 17:40.003
[SPEAKER_01]: So coffee in the Bahamas right out, coffee in Barbados, not a good bet, because it doesn't have the right climate, it doesn't have the right growing conditions for coffee to thrive.
17:39.983 --> 17:56.035
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will say that what these two commodities have in common is very much a reliance on enslaved labor to make them work, but the scale sugar plantations usually very large, coffee farms traditionally much, much smaller, but both dependent on travel bondage.
17:56.015 --> 18:04.807
[SPEAKER_02]: There has been a lot, of course, in the news recently, about tariffs in general and tariffs and how they are affecting coffee and coffee prices.
18:05.628 --> 18:18.546
[SPEAKER_02]: But one thing that's really interesting about what you're writing about is the way that tariff and price protections have been so important to really the whole history of coffee in the Americas.
18:18.526 --> 18:27.988
[SPEAKER_02]: She talked a little bit about that and the ways that sort of unexpected ways that we see that really affecting how coffee as an industry progresses.
18:28.028 --> 18:35.485
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make you wait for Brazil even though I know that that has the closest president today's conversation.
18:35.946 --> 18:36.788
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will bring it up.
18:37.325 --> 18:41.355
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me give you three touchdowns to think of that with coffee and pricing.
18:41.936 --> 18:48.051
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first is going to be how coffee first you taint an important British imperial project.
18:48.552 --> 18:54.928
[SPEAKER_01]: So because there were other empires that were competing and because it was not
18:54.908 --> 18:59.779
[SPEAKER_01]: undertaken for the most part by planters, but the same level of means as sugar planters.
19:00.300 --> 19:02.966
[SPEAKER_01]: Early on, it needed protection, and if it was going to grow.
19:03.006 --> 19:09.981
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the characters I introduced in the book is the Nicholas Laws, who was a governor in Jamaica.
19:09.961 --> 19:15.327
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he retired, he becomes interested in different botanical experiments and coffee as one of them.
19:15.347 --> 19:19.572
[SPEAKER_01]: He's be planted the first 28 trees in a coffee trees in Jamaica.
19:20.013 --> 19:28.022
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he passed away, or soon after he passed away, a number of flanters got together and petitioned Parliament or basically tax protection.
19:28.483 --> 19:32.587
[SPEAKER_01]: What they wanted was, which they received, Parliament agreed.
19:32.607 --> 19:39.175
[SPEAKER_01]: What they wanted was that for coffee that was grown and sold within the British Empire to be tax-free.
19:39.155 --> 19:47.857
[SPEAKER_01]: and for a heavy import tax to be placed on any copy that came in from a colony other than the British Empire.
19:47.877 --> 19:54.193
[SPEAKER_01]: And they succeeded and that's part of what gave them the financial buffer to be able to grow the industry as well as they did.
19:55.338 --> 20:13.043
[SPEAKER_01]: The second moment I'm going to give you, I'm going to fast forward, so we're so used to thinking about the American Revolution as fighting against, and it was, I'm not going to say it wasn't, but fighting against efforts by Parliament to control economic activity in what becomes the United States.
20:13.023 --> 20:39.300
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sometimes surprising when I tell people that during the Revolutionary War, because of scarcity and increasing price inflation as a result, it's not surprising that during war prices would go up, there's disruptions of trade, there's efforts by both the British and the American Army to secure supplies, and so there's fewer and fewer goods to buy prices are naturally going to go up as if five goes down.
20:40.259 --> 20:46.170
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were a number of goods that the Americans threatened states.
20:46.190 --> 20:49.276
[SPEAKER_01]: They felt were necessary for everyday life.
20:49.576 --> 21:02.200
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they initially began started in New England in Massachusetts in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, but then trickles down in New York and also Pennsylvania, almost all colonies in act various forms of price.
21:02.635 --> 21:03.737
[SPEAKER_01]: structures or limits.
21:04.459 --> 21:09.890
[SPEAKER_01]: And they identify about 25 or 26 goes so they think are essential to daily life.
21:10.050 --> 21:11.072
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee is among those.
21:11.513 --> 21:16.403
[SPEAKER_01]: So to me that's a really important piece of evidence because it demonstrates that coffee has become so common.
21:16.664 --> 21:17.706
[SPEAKER_01]: T was not on that list.
21:18.027 --> 21:22.095
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee has become so common that it is an expected part of daily life.
21:22.075 --> 21:31.449
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as a result like flour and corn and peas and beef, it's going to be protected by the price tap so that people can't start charging higher and higher rates.
21:32.530 --> 21:43.206
[SPEAKER_01]: And the third example, which does bring us up to today's thoughts on coffee and tariffs, is closer to the end of my book.
21:43.658 --> 22:03.152
[SPEAKER_01]: most of my book focuses on North American West Indian commerce, but my last chapter I had to take a tour because by the 1830s, Brazil had really begun to emerge as this leading power house in coffee production, and in 1832, I think it became effective in 33.
22:03.537 --> 22:11.951
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a group that have joined together to petition Congress to abolish all taxes and tariffs on imported copy.
22:12.271 --> 22:13.373
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're doing it for two reasons.
22:13.433 --> 22:18.922
[SPEAKER_01]: First, the copy importers are seriously interested because this will give them a global advantage.
22:18.942 --> 22:22.288
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're joined interestingly enough by temperance movement.
22:22.268 --> 22:28.838
[SPEAKER_01]: who are trying to find an alternative to alcohol that is a beverage that can be broadly embraced, right, and promote it.
22:29.319 --> 22:37.011
[SPEAKER_01]: So these two groups come together and successfully petitioned for the United States to become the only nation in the world that did not tax coffee.
22:37.031 --> 22:47.888
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was that combination of US importation and increasing Brazilian production that created candidly a partnership that persisted this day.
22:47.868 --> 22:50.894
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a fascinating history.
22:50.974 --> 22:54.181
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, what you just said about the temperance movement.
22:54.201 --> 23:03.218
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's really interesting to think about how little moralizing there is about coffee compared to alcohol when they're both highly addictive.
23:03.639 --> 23:04.020
[SPEAKER_02]: There.
23:04.000 --> 23:08.069
[SPEAKER_02]: they're both as you mention, reliant on enslaved labor.
23:08.109 --> 23:17.329
[SPEAKER_02]: In this case, it's a product that does not even grow within the continental U.S. Was it just that they're looking for sort of non-alcohol sources?
23:17.389 --> 23:20.916
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it just the losing battle to try to fight against coffee?
23:20.957 --> 23:23.983
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what's your sense of what was going on there?
23:25.077 --> 23:27.100
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is some pushback.
23:27.581 --> 23:28.843
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, let's talk about addiction.
23:29.203 --> 23:37.535
[SPEAKER_01]: There's fairly early on, I mean, by the late 16, even 17th century in Europe, there's a recognition that coffee has an impact on the body.
23:38.116 --> 23:44.946
[SPEAKER_01]: Mind you, some of the accounts from that early are amusing in terms of what they think, how coffee impacts the body.
23:45.487 --> 23:47.490
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's various kinds of medical literature.
23:47.825 --> 23:57.143
[SPEAKER_01]: some of those who support Coffee's Consumptioner saying it's, you know, great for everything from Typhoid to Latchelons, I'm not joking, but then there's a whole other range.
23:57.663 --> 24:04.833
[SPEAKER_01]: of pamphlets and writers who are arguing that coffee causes infertility, that coffee causes imponence.
24:05.294 --> 24:15.489
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's even a recognition that because it's an important good in Western Europe and then certainly in North America, that coffee causes dependence, that becomes associated with this word dependence really, really on.
24:15.969 --> 24:26.725
[SPEAKER_01]: So you definitely have practitioners who are not necessarily always fancy coffee as early
24:28.105 --> 24:32.749
[SPEAKER_01]: cookbooks don't become regularly published in North America until the 19th century.
24:32.789 --> 24:39.576
[SPEAKER_01]: There are some lady-cancensary examples, but for the most part of these important books that were coming from England, primarily.
24:39.976 --> 24:55.851
[SPEAKER_01]: But even there you have people who are beginning to distinguish between coffee, coffee, fruit, fruit, children, coffee, food for people who are ill, coffee, fruit for the elderly, because there's a recognition that caffeine can have a different impact depending on who you are,
24:55.831 --> 24:57.414
[SPEAKER_01]: and what you help is not.
24:57.915 --> 25:08.155
[SPEAKER_01]: But I wanted to return to one of the aspects of that, which is this question about the association of coffee with slavery, because it is.
25:08.215 --> 25:15.730
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a wonderful, if I had more time, and it might be another project, a published one article about it, but it could use a book.
25:17.077 --> 25:26.814
[SPEAKER_01]: Their coffee does become not quite as prominently as sugar, but certainly with sugar, one of the primary targets of the pre-produce movement of the early 19th century.
25:26.934 --> 25:29.318
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's an arm of the abolition movement.
25:29.338 --> 25:35.188
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're looking for ways that you can try to find coffee that's not produced by enslaved hands.
25:36.089 --> 25:41.278
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's easier for something like tea, which is produced in China or India.
25:42.828 --> 25:47.192
[SPEAKER_01]: not by what I would call free labor but not by enslaved labor.
25:47.212 --> 25:48.734
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee is more challenging.
25:49.354 --> 26:00.345
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not until after the Haitian Revolution and Haiti gains independence but the French empire that you really have a large potential producer of free coffee.
26:00.726 --> 26:11.316
[SPEAKER_01]: The challenge there is that the United States, like most of Western Europe, chooses to boycott Haiti because it is the
26:12.443 --> 26:24.475
[SPEAKER_01]: But you will find and trying to promote things like Chickery, or everything is, I mean, really our efforts to try to grow copy at North America to lessen our defendants and have a free, free label option.
26:24.936 --> 26:33.324
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're trying to burn Rye and Wee, and create a cup as one abolitionist template says.
26:33.584 --> 26:35.026
[SPEAKER_01]: They give all of these various options.
26:35.046 --> 26:37.908
[SPEAKER_01]: You can try burning Rye, you can try roasting Wee.
26:38.349 --> 26:42.433
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these are very good.
26:42.920 --> 26:43.842
[SPEAKER_02]: No, nothing.
26:43.862 --> 26:48.629
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like coffee, you mentioned the material aspect culture.
26:48.750 --> 26:50.713
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if you could talk some about that.
26:50.973 --> 27:07.881
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, coffee, of course, is striking because people of all social classes eventually drink it and drink it in huge numbers, but the way they're preparing it, the way they're consuming it, the thinking around coffee and the rituals that go with it can be very different.
27:07.861 --> 27:12.325
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is what I hope is one of the big takeaways from the book.
27:12.345 --> 27:26.558
[SPEAKER_01]: My argument is that because coffee is less expensive for pound than tea throughout the colonial period, or than chocolate for that matter, significantly less, many, many more people drank coffee, then drank those other beverages.
27:27.259 --> 27:28.380
[SPEAKER_01]: But how they drank it?
27:28.880 --> 27:30.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Very significant one.
27:30.982 --> 27:35.286
[SPEAKER_01]: At the top end of the scale, I was looking at a range of different materials and price points.
27:35.266 --> 27:41.362
[SPEAKER_01]: At the top of the scale you have something like Sterling Silver, which is extremely expensive, right?
27:41.402 --> 27:47.478
[SPEAKER_01]: A very small percentage of North America's population could afford a Sterling Silver set.
27:48.220 --> 27:50.406
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will point out, and I do in the book that
27:50.386 --> 27:57.298
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were going to have a full sterling set, you would have a coffee pot, a tea pot, a creamer, a sugar, sugar tongs, a trade.
27:57.518 --> 28:00.403
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a wide range of a company that's a second come with it.
28:00.704 --> 28:02.026
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an expensive investment.
28:02.447 --> 28:14.267
[SPEAKER_01]: But bearing in mind that a coffee pot is usually about twice the size of a tea pot, a coffee pot will always be the most expensive object in that set because it just takes that much more metal to create, right?
28:15.344 --> 28:16.425
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were other options.
28:16.906 --> 28:28.179
[SPEAKER_01]: After plating became very commonplace, metal plating, you could have silver plated copy and T services, and candidly by the end of the year, it can central you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
28:28.339 --> 28:38.791
[SPEAKER_01]: Once they come across a process called shut the up plating that bonds silver with other metals to a base metal, you could not only coat the outside but the exterior, the underneath.
28:39.432 --> 28:44.878
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, only if you picked it up and you knew the weight difference would you know that you're not
28:44.858 --> 28:51.128
[SPEAKER_01]: But copyfats also come in imported ceramics, in stonewares, in painted tinware.
28:51.688 --> 28:57.277
[SPEAKER_01]: Really any price point along the line, you can find copy of clipage that's going to match it.
28:57.778 --> 29:01.684
[SPEAKER_01]: So I will also add there are these moments in the archive.
29:01.704 --> 29:03.787
[SPEAKER_01]: You probably get this from others figures.
29:03.807 --> 29:09.195
[SPEAKER_01]: There are these moments in the archive when you find something you think, oh, that's going to make an amazing
29:09.175 --> 29:12.040
[SPEAKER_01]: The letters of Mary Schiffen are one of those for me.
29:12.160 --> 29:15.184
[SPEAKER_01]: She was married to Joseph Schiffen, the Schiffen family.
29:15.204 --> 29:20.813
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very prominent in Philadelphia, very, very doctors, lawyers, very well-off.
29:20.833 --> 29:24.940
[SPEAKER_01]: But she's visiting a family of relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
29:25.901 --> 29:30.829
[SPEAKER_01]: And she writes back to her husband Joseph, that for the most part, she's found the visit to be lovely.
29:30.809 --> 29:40.304
[SPEAKER_01]: But she did notice that her hostess when she is setting out afternoon coffee and doesn't have enough cups for everyone in the room will add teacups so that everybody has a vessel, right?
29:40.324 --> 29:48.937
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's a little appalled by it and she reminds her that her own copy service set is chipped and she implores Joseph to buy replacements.
29:48.957 --> 29:52.142
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason I love to this story so much is it tells me a couple of minutes.
29:52.122 --> 30:02.501
[SPEAKER_01]: It tells me that there are families who are already invested in coffee and coffee consumption that they need and want a full set and they recognize the difference when they don't have it.
30:03.623 --> 30:07.650
[SPEAKER_01]: But it also tells me that people in Lancaster Pennsylvania are family.
30:07.630 --> 30:08.671
[SPEAKER_01]: are just making do.
30:08.872 --> 30:10.594
[SPEAKER_01]: They also are coffee with what they have.
30:11.115 --> 30:20.949
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not required that you have all the equipment, but if you have the means and you feel like you have the social standing that that kind of that it can is expected, it has been important.
30:20.969 --> 30:27.478
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course that's all the same today if people drink coffee at all sorts of different price points with all sorts of
30:27.458 --> 30:57.094
[SPEAKER_02]: for an equipment and is so I want to go back to talking about coffee houses where we began, you know, I think that certainly many of us know how important and ubiquitous coffee shops are now have worked in several of myself when I was in grad school, but I think what we think of as the coffee shop now while it may have connections to the coffee houses that you're talking about which in the pre-revolutionary revolutionary time is not exactly the same kind of place.
30:57.074 --> 31:06.283
[SPEAKER_02]: described what that was like the importance of those places, not just as a place to get and drink coffee, but as an actual social space.
31:07.324 --> 31:10.627
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a question that I grappled with a lot when I was writing this book.
31:10.647 --> 31:11.508
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the distinction?
31:11.568 --> 31:15.532
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the difference between an in a tower and a tower and a tower and a tower?
31:15.993 --> 31:26.423
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it was just really lovely letter that was written by an author who was nephew when he first moved to Philadelphia in the 1760s.
31:26.403 --> 31:28.807
[SPEAKER_01]: don't trifle your time away at the top at the table.
31:29.267 --> 31:31.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't trifle your time away at games of chance.
31:31.751 --> 31:36.118
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to be taken seriously as a man of business, get yourself to a coffee house.
31:36.899 --> 31:37.960
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a reason why.
31:39.222 --> 31:51.060
[SPEAKER_01]: When you called yourself a coffee house, you were conveying something to the public about what you were and the kinds of activities you supported all of these places.
31:51.665 --> 31:52.727
[SPEAKER_01]: surf food and beverage.
31:53.528 --> 31:54.750
[SPEAKER_01]: And please don't misunderstand.
31:54.810 --> 31:56.672
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee houses didn't just surf coffee.
31:56.933 --> 31:59.577
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not how they were like today's coffee houses.
31:59.617 --> 32:03.503
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a full range of beverages usually, including alcohol.
32:03.723 --> 32:07.068
[SPEAKER_01]: I only found one coffee house that didn't have a liquor license it closed in two years.
32:07.869 --> 32:09.451
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a full menu of food.
32:09.932 --> 32:14.719
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they offer accommodation as well in the same way that ins and taverns them.
32:14.739 --> 32:16.542
[SPEAKER_01]: But the ways that they were different
32:16.825 --> 32:22.900
[SPEAKER_01]: is that coffee houses, and they call themselves a coffee house, because they were associating themselves as a place of business.
32:23.742 --> 32:31.260
[SPEAKER_01]: They housed many of the activities that ultimately would become different industries, but weren't in the 18th century in the colonial theory.
32:31.881 --> 32:34.648
[SPEAKER_01]: So, coffee houses are places where
32:35.658 --> 32:37.601
[SPEAKER_01]: currency exchange was compared.
32:37.641 --> 32:39.284
[SPEAKER_01]: They would have regular exchange days.
32:39.624 --> 32:43.771
[SPEAKER_01]: So currency from around, not only the empire, but around multiple empires, right?
32:43.791 --> 32:50.983
[SPEAKER_01]: These are places of trade, for merchants and traders or meaty would be posted, so that you would know what their relative value.
32:50.963 --> 32:53.668
[SPEAKER_01]: They were places of information gathering.
32:53.748 --> 32:55.051
[SPEAKER_01]: They kept business directways.
32:55.431 --> 32:57.074
[SPEAKER_01]: They kept newspapers of Egyptians.
32:57.555 --> 33:10.820
[SPEAKER_01]: One copyhouse is advertising that they spend over 400 pounds a year on newspaper subscriptions so that their members can be aware of what's happening around the world, where there's political unrest, where there might be environmental events or hurricanes, what's it fashion?
33:11.241 --> 33:12.904
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, these are all things they need to know.
33:12.884 --> 33:15.007
[SPEAKER_01]: They served as places of maritime insurance.
33:15.027 --> 33:16.850
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't a separate insurance industry.
33:16.890 --> 33:22.057
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you wanted to get insurance for your ship, usually you were procuring it at a coffee house.
33:22.077 --> 33:29.568
[SPEAKER_01]: So by setting themselves up this way, by calling themselves by that moniker, they were basically saying, we are places of business.
33:29.708 --> 33:32.732
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is our primary set of activities.
33:33.387 --> 33:48.372
[SPEAKER_02]: We've mentioned that coffee is not something that is grown within what becomes the US, but you do demonstrate that there are coffee brands that are US brands that start to really deliberately sell themselves as all-American.
33:48.853 --> 33:51.096
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a big part of their advertising.
33:51.677 --> 33:52.819
[SPEAKER_02]: You talk some about that.
33:52.899 --> 33:59.310
[SPEAKER_02]: What it is that they're trying to do, they're in other succeeding in that with a product that of course is grown somewhere else.
33:59.864 --> 34:09.079
[SPEAKER_01]: The interesting thing is, so if I was going to take coffee where coffee production and put it into three big chapters, these would be day.
34:09.580 --> 34:16.050
[SPEAKER_01]: In the colonial period, but the most part, when North Americans are drinking coffee, they're drinking coffee in the British Empire.
34:16.070 --> 34:24.724
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm early from Jamaica, or after the seven years were when Britain gets the seeded islands from France, from places like Dominica, or Grenada, or St. Vincent.
34:24.704 --> 34:37.736
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you had copy from somewhere else, you were sure to advertise it, particularly if you had copy from the East Indies from places like Java or Revol or from French Sunday.
34:38.336 --> 34:41.960
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you do get to see a moniker associated in advertising with copy.
34:41.980 --> 34:48.806
[SPEAKER_01]: Normally in an ad from this 18th century copy is literally just copy, one of 60 goods that a shopkeeper is of a stint.
34:49.126 --> 34:54.711
[SPEAKER_01]: But if they had French copy or if they had Java copy, they would make sure to tell
34:54.691 --> 34:59.659
[SPEAKER_01]: In the post-revolutionary period, I'm going to get to your American branding and a moment I promise.
35:00.300 --> 35:06.431
[SPEAKER_01]: In the post-revolutionary period, when the United States is no longer a part of the British Empire, they're looking around for different partners.
35:06.872 --> 35:11.940
[SPEAKER_01]: And so then, again, naming is important because if you're importing coffee from
35:11.920 --> 35:32.241
[SPEAKER_01]: Cuba or from or from sentiment before the the Haitian Revolution or from Puerto Rico, you're going to actually advertise where it comes from because again people have already begun to distinguish differences in taste and sophistication in terms of brewing technique or bursting techniques from these different places, but
35:33.031 --> 35:44.996
[SPEAKER_01]: by the 19th century and again, particularly after the 1830s and the United States very close affiliation with Brazil, almost all of our copy, well over 90% of our copies coming from that one supplier.
35:45.958 --> 35:51.630
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you see in the advertising is a really interesting shift rather than focusing on Brazilian copies.
35:52.842 --> 35:56.092
[SPEAKER_01]: copy itself, become free-made as an American product.
35:56.473 --> 35:58.319
[SPEAKER_01]: For two reasons, I would argue.
35:58.760 --> 36:02.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Number one, we're not just importing copy for ourselves, right?
36:02.551 --> 36:07.105
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the United States, we're importing copy to re-export around the world.
36:07.253 --> 36:12.201
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're taking a Brazilian commodity and we're remaking it into an American export.
36:12.822 --> 36:20.114
[SPEAKER_01]: To do that, you need to have faith in the American companies that are importing it, packaging it, and selling it to you.
36:20.635 --> 36:28.688
[SPEAKER_01]: So in that repackaging, it's very important for these merchants to emphasize their United States origins.
36:28.887 --> 36:35.415
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, by extension, that same overlay stills out onto the domestic company scene as well.
36:35.815 --> 36:39.399
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee becomes literally promoted as this all-American beverage.
36:39.459 --> 36:54.557
[SPEAKER_01]: And you see that in the advertising language, you see that in the advertising imagery, this affiliation of coffee with the past presidents, with eagles, and with other sites of nationalism, other signs of nationalism.
36:54.537 --> 37:22.688
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's a very deliberate effort and it's repeated in company after company after company, so that, rather than saying, we are proudly selling you, resilient coffee, it is your proudly selling you on American coffee, even though there was one beautiful coffee box I found, tin box I found that says United States coffee from its own
37:22.668 --> 37:30.095
[SPEAKER_01]: At the moment of first of sight, I thought to myself that's because you couldn't grow copy in the United States until you redefined what the United States was.
37:30.615 --> 37:36.340
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you could claim that we had a domestic source of coffee, but it could never compete with something like Brazil.
37:37.261 --> 37:40.104
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that public history is really important to you.
37:40.124 --> 37:52.675
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if you could talk about the different forms that takes and you know, do you find that studying things like coffee helps with
37:52.655 --> 37:52.781
[UNKNOWN]: You
37:53.650 --> 37:54.411
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely.
37:54.631 --> 37:58.195
[SPEAKER_01]: So public history for me, I should say, so I mentioned I have a museum back now.
37:58.575 --> 38:05.763
[SPEAKER_01]: I've also spent a lot of time doing works with teacher education programs, with school groups, and all of that informs my current job.
38:05.903 --> 38:13.271
[SPEAKER_01]: I now direct a library in museum, which is fantastic way of combining my best professional lives into one nice package.
38:13.291 --> 38:23.202
[SPEAKER_01]: But to me, the distinction between public history and academic history, not as stark as it used to be,
38:23.587 --> 38:37.982
[SPEAKER_01]: So academic history is your more traditional thinking about publications for a tick-bop teaching or for college teaching or for other historians, whereas public history has, as its name implies, a mandate to think about as broader reaches possible.
38:38.543 --> 38:44.409
[SPEAKER_01]: To do that, I think it's especially helpful to start with a question that many people would find and gauge it.
38:44.950 --> 38:45.170
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
38:45.290 --> 38:47.232
[SPEAKER_01]: If I started with the question,
38:47.212 --> 38:53.275
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, how does the United States restructure its trade networks in the early 19th century?
38:53.316 --> 38:58.656
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not going to grab people as much as, say, what is the history of copy trading?
38:59.108 --> 39:00.411
[SPEAKER_01]: Where does your coffee come from?
39:00.451 --> 39:02.736
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that differ than where it came from in the past?
39:03.277 --> 39:06.644
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a much more engaging interest point.
39:06.664 --> 39:11.054
[SPEAKER_01]: I think for a general public about, what is it, in fact, a very complicated story?
39:11.074 --> 39:17.207
[SPEAKER_02]: I would like to encourage listeners to read your book and learn about that history of coffee.
39:17.267 --> 39:18.670
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you tell them how they can do that?
39:19.325 --> 39:25.272
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, the title of the book is Coffey Nation, how one commodity transformed the early United States.
39:25.833 --> 39:37.626
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was published by the University of Pennsylvania, so you can find it on their website, but you can also find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, on many other any website that would sell books that book here.
39:37.807 --> 39:39.168
[SPEAKER_01]: So I hope you do think about it.
39:39.629 --> 39:46.817
[SPEAKER_01]: If you love coffee or if you know somebody else who loves coffee, I'd like to think that it would make an excellent gift as we move with holiday season.
39:46.797 --> 39:49.941
[SPEAKER_02]: I think everyone must know, at least one person that loves coffee.
39:50.601 --> 39:52.844
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?
39:53.685 --> 40:05.218
[SPEAKER_01]: The other reason I really like this topic, and I particularly like it as we're coming up to 2026, which is the two-fifth year course of the Declaration of Independence, and if you didn't know that by now, congratulations next year, is the two-fifth year.
40:05.859 --> 40:11.505
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes in a really nice time to think about some of our re-thinks of our American myths.
40:11.587 --> 40:20.222
[SPEAKER_01]: So when people think about the American Revolution and these iconic stories, one of them that almost immediately comes to mind is the Boston Tea Party.
40:21.364 --> 40:24.730
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not going to say that I don't like Boston, I dislike the Tea Party.
40:25.110 --> 40:27.594
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to say I'm from Philadelphia and Boston Philadelphia.
40:27.615 --> 40:29.658
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a big rivalry where it comes to the Tea Party.
40:29.698 --> 40:31.401
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not why I'm making this argument.
40:32.427 --> 40:46.513
[SPEAKER_01]: The Boston Tea Party is cast as this moment of American bravery, right, of this underdog, going against the machinery of empire, breaking on the ships of night and destroying what would become a really hated commodity that represented parliamentary control.
40:47.615 --> 40:49.238
[SPEAKER_01]: I start my book.
40:49.218 --> 40:59.400
[SPEAKER_01]: very deliberately, and this was another aha moment in the archives, very deliberately with a story that I found in the letters from Abigail Adams, to her husband, John Adams.
40:59.981 --> 41:03.970
[SPEAKER_01]: She was living in Boston, but time when he was in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress.
41:04.709 --> 41:15.929
[SPEAKER_01]: And the story she recounted was of women lining up outside a warehouse, owned by a man named Thomas Foyleston, and demanding that he opened it because they knew he was keeping coffee.
41:16.290 --> 41:26.869
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was when price controls had gone into a fact, so he had removed his cropping which stores for a very long time off of the market, so he didn't have to sell it at these deflated prices.
41:26.849 --> 41:28.975
[SPEAKER_01]: but then they couldn't find any coffee at all the buy.
41:29.016 --> 41:37.662
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they lined up, they demanded his keys, they went into his warehouse, they took the coffee out, and then they gave it to the city to sell it at the regulated prices.
41:38.264 --> 41:39.407
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't destroy it.
41:39.674 --> 41:51.450
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't steal it, they kept it, and they distributed it for people to purchase at Fair Rates, and to me, when you line these two stories upside by upside, they're interesting.
41:52.191 --> 42:07.993
[SPEAKER_01]: One is a very in some ways masculine story, right, of men who are under cover of night conducting this secretive attack against a British Empire, but this was a group of women who
42:08.463 --> 42:09.764
[SPEAKER_01]: are demanding what they want.
42:09.965 --> 42:11.867
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they wanted was coffee.
42:12.968 --> 42:27.424
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, these two stories are a beautiful way to think about how much more diverse the impact of the American Revolution was on every day people and how much more complex that story is, how much more than it is to learn.
42:27.965 --> 42:30.087
[SPEAKER_02]: Michelle, thank you so much for speaking with me.
42:30.127 --> 42:37.035
[SPEAKER_02]: I loved learning more about my beloved
42:37.015 --> 42:37.937
[SPEAKER_02]: It was my pleasure.
42:38.017 --> 42:53.691
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much for having me.
43:10.630 --> 43:12.592
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
43:13.373 --> 43:16.898
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
43:17.378 --> 43:22.865
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript at UnSungHistoryPodcast.com.
43:23.486 --> 43:29.553
[SPEAKER_00]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by UnSungHistory are in the public domain or are used with permission.
43:30.394 --> 43:36.722
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find us on Instagram at UnSungUnderScoreUunderScoreHistory or on Facebook at UnSungHistoryPodcast.
43:37.276 --> 43:40.973
[SPEAKER_00]: The contact is with questions, corrections, praise, or absolute suggestions.
43:41.435 --> 43:43.967
[SPEAKER_00]: Please email Kelliette on site historypunkest.com.
43:44.730 --> 43:48.689
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.
43:49.071 --> 43:49.412
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!
00:00.031 --> 00:08.820
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
00:09.720 --> 00:12.543
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
00:12.563 --> 00:19.430
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
00:20.591 --> 00:27.658
[SPEAKER_02]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never
00:27.638 --> 00:32.847
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.
00:37.715 --> 00:45.629
[SPEAKER_02]: As legend would have it, sometime in perhaps the ninth century, an Ethiopian goat herder named Caldi.
00:46.531 --> 00:53.022
[SPEAKER_02]: Found his missing goats dancing all night after eating the berries of a small
00:54.200 --> 00:58.024
[SPEAKER_02]: Caldi himself tried the berries and felt a rush of energy.
00:58.044 --> 01:07.214
[SPEAKER_02]: He then introduced these berries to nearby monks, who threw them into the fire, fearing them the work of the devil.
01:07.254 --> 01:20.848
[SPEAKER_02]: The smell of the roasting berries, though, was so enticing that they pulled them out to make the world's
01:21.402 --> 01:30.535
[SPEAKER_02]: coffee did originate in Ethiopia, and was being traded throughout Africa in the Middle East by the 15th century.
01:32.518 --> 01:45.857
[SPEAKER_02]: By the 18th century, European demand for coffee was so great that the Dutch and the British were both experimenting with growing coffee trees in their American colonies.
01:47.356 --> 01:59.592
[SPEAKER_02]: an attempt by the governor of Barbados to make the island a hub of coffee production failed, in part because Barbados was so dominated by sugar plantations.
02:00.614 --> 02:06.942
[SPEAKER_02]: But even more because Barbados didn't have the elevation needed to grow coffee trees.
02:09.185 --> 02:15.574
[SPEAKER_02]: That mountainous train was found instead
02:16.718 --> 02:23.647
[SPEAKER_02]: where the former governor, Sir Nicholas Laws, planted the island's first coffee trees.
02:25.249 --> 02:46.017
[SPEAKER_02]: At Laws' urging, the British House of Commons passed in 1732, an act for encouraging the growth of coffee in his Majesty's Plantations in America, which reduced the import duties on coffee grown
02:46.418 --> 03:02.135
[SPEAKER_02]: as opposed to foreign coffee, several of the islands ceded to the British by the French in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, were likewise well-suited for growing coffee.
03:05.759 --> 03:13.067
[SPEAKER_02]: From Jamaica and the rest of the British West Indies,
03:14.819 --> 03:27.358
[SPEAKER_02]: By the early 1770s, at least a third of the coffee imported into British North America, and sometimes as much as half, came through Philadelphia.
03:27.378 --> 03:31.163
[SPEAKER_02]: That trade grew quickly.
03:31.184 --> 03:38.194
[SPEAKER_02]: More than doubling between 1768 and 1773,
03:38.275 --> 03:46.905
[SPEAKER_02]: When 288,632 pounds of coffee was imported from Jamaica to Philadelphia.
03:46.965 --> 04:02.663
[SPEAKER_02]: Some North Americans sourced coffee from elsewhere in the world, but the favorable taxes for coffee from the British colonies made other coffee significantly more expensive by comparison.
04:06.085 --> 04:20.463
[SPEAKER_02]: Three of the mid-18th century, most North Americans were using imported coffee pots, which at 25 to 40 ounces were significantly larger than tea pots.
04:22.446 --> 04:35.923
[SPEAKER_02]: The coffee itself was brewed in a kettle and then transferred to the coffee pot, which was tall and thin with the spout near the top, so as to avoid pouring out the grounds.
04:37.743 --> 04:49.142
[SPEAKER_02]: Coffee Pots were made from a range of materials, from porcelain and ceramic to metals, including silver for the wealthiest coffee drinkers.
04:51.145 --> 05:02.805
[SPEAKER_02]: Paul Revere, best known for his midnight ride, was a Boston Silver Smith, who made a dozen coffee pots in the decade and a half before the American Revolution.
05:03.899 --> 05:13.072
[SPEAKER_02]: including one as a part of a wedding set for William Pean, that took 45 ounces of sterling silver to create.
05:15.516 --> 05:28.455
[SPEAKER_02]: After the December 1773 Tea Party, when Bostonians destroyed over 90,000 pounds of tea, worth over 1.5 million in today's dollars.
05:29.363 --> 05:40.077
[SPEAKER_02]: The British Parliament passed four acts that they called the coercive acts, but which the American colonists refer to as the intolerable acts.
05:41.939 --> 05:58.240
[SPEAKER_02]: In reaction to these acts, which limited the autonomy of British North American colonies, especially Massachusetts, the continental Congress formed.
05:58.355 --> 06:09.851
[SPEAKER_02]: and then expanded to an embargo on all goods from Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies, which, of course, included coffee.
06:09.891 --> 06:19.103
[SPEAKER_02]: Americans never stopped drinking coffee, but it became harder to come by during the war.
06:20.585 --> 06:25.712
[SPEAKER_02]: With one source of it being the capture of ships sailing under British flags,
06:27.802 --> 06:33.333
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the colonies set the price of coffee, along with other goods during the war.
06:33.393 --> 06:46.941
[SPEAKER_02]: Since coffee could be stored for long periods of time, unlike many other foods, retailers would store their coffee to wait for a favorable pricing situation.
06:49.283 --> 07:00.178
[SPEAKER_02]: After Congress signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France in 1778, the French West Indies opened to American trading.
07:00.218 --> 07:11.513
[SPEAKER_02]: And by 1781, 93% of coffee imported into the United States came from the French Caribbean.
07:11.533 --> 07:18.362
[SPEAKER_02]: Accordingly, coffee prices returned to pre-revolutionary levels.
07:20.553 --> 07:25.141
[SPEAKER_02]: In the next half century, though, Americans would find a new source of coffee.
07:26.944 --> 07:47.337
[SPEAKER_02]: In the 1830s, the U.S. Congress repealed the tariff on foreign coffee, since there were no sources of coffee in the continental U.S. At the same time, Brazil began to invest in coffee production,
07:49.004 --> 07:55.074
[SPEAKER_02]: A year later, Brazilian coffee made up over 60% of US coffee imports.
07:56.857 --> 08:03.568
[SPEAKER_02]: As of December 2024, Brazil remained the top supplier of coffee to the United States.
08:04.450 --> 08:09.358
[SPEAKER_02]: A 32% of American coffee being imported from Brazil.
08:12.173 --> 08:25.675
[SPEAKER_02]: According to the Fall 2025 National Coffee Data Trends Report, 66% of adult Americans drink coffee every day, averaging three cups a day.
08:25.695 --> 08:33.388
[SPEAKER_02]: As Bill Murray, CEO and President of the National Coffee Association noted,
08:34.162 --> 08:41.737
[SPEAKER_02]: Quote, coffee's staying power as a beloved touchstone in Americans' daily lives is remarkable.
08:41.757 --> 08:50.494
[SPEAKER_02]: And its contributions to our health and our economy give Americans even more grounds for celebration.
08:50.554 --> 08:55.343
[SPEAKER_02]: This national coffee day and every day, unwoot.
08:57.044 --> 09:16.420
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Michelle Craig McDonald, director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, and to author of Coffee Nation, how one commodity transformed the early United States.
09:20.534 --> 09:24.779
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got a mission, it's just a simple thing.
09:25.340 --> 09:28.523
[SPEAKER_03]: I've only one ambition to have the right to bring you.
09:28.563 --> 09:35.291
[SPEAKER_03]: You're coffee in the morning and kisses in the night.
09:36.412 --> 09:43.521
[SPEAKER_03]: It's my desire to do as I am told to have what you require and never have it told you.
09:43.541 --> 09:48.887
[SPEAKER_03]: You're coffee in the morning and kisses in the night.
09:50.470 --> 09:52.514
[SPEAKER_02]: Michelle, thanks so much for joining me today.
09:52.554 --> 09:54.978
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me on the show.
09:54.998 --> 09:55.679
[SPEAKER_02]: I appreciate it.
09:56.981 --> 10:06.698
[SPEAKER_02]: I am a little bit obsessed with coffee, have been addicted for many many decades now, so it's really exciting to read about some about the history of coffee.
10:06.738 --> 10:11.466
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm wondering what got you interested initially into this research.
10:12.408 --> 10:22.706
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in addition to Ion, desperate love of the drink, it was, I will say it was a, it was a topic that I came upon almost by accident when I started graduate school.
10:22.787 --> 10:27.315
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was a number of years ago, for the listeners who can't see me, I now have white hair.
10:27.775 --> 10:30.841
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was the confluence of two classes.
10:31.502 --> 10:37.032
[SPEAKER_01]: So I took a class in early modern British history, and I was, at that time, I thought
10:37.012 --> 10:43.864
[SPEAKER_01]: I had applied to graduate school to say I was going to study the emergence of public education after the Civil War in the United States.
10:43.924 --> 10:50.115
[SPEAKER_01]: That is clearly not what I chose to study, but I was still really interested in ideas about literacy.
10:50.295 --> 10:55.665
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I thought I would look at places where people can get their information if they couldn't read or write.
10:56.366 --> 10:58.530
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was focusing on
10:58.510 --> 11:11.251
[SPEAKER_01]: ines and taverns and especially copy houses where a news and events were frequently discussed out loud, discussed in groups and so that was the first thing that sort of caught my eye in the coffee realm.
11:12.073 --> 11:22.510
[SPEAKER_01]: The next semester I took a class on Atlantic World history which looks at how the Americas and Africa and Europe are tied together and I thought well I can't
11:22.490 --> 11:30.348
[SPEAKER_01]: look at copy houses again, but I can look at copy plantations and see what I could learn about how coffee was grown and how it was distributed.
11:30.989 --> 11:40.009
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I realized in these two classes is that there was one really interesting set of books that were looking at the history of copy houses mostly in Western Europe.
11:39.989 --> 12:01.980
[SPEAKER_01]: But for then, the copy just sort of showed up ready to be consumed and then in books about copy plantations and they were far fewer, really for the 18th century, most of the book is whose own sugar, but where I could find references to copy, they end pretty much of the port of the island or the colony ready to be exported, but these books weren't talking to each other.
12:01.960 --> 12:15.780
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's where the idea for this project came about, a history that looked at how and when coffee came to the Americas, how it was grown, how it was traded, and ultimately how it was consumed, how it was drawn quite a people who came to love it.
12:16.701 --> 12:20.266
[SPEAKER_02]: And what are some of the sources that you're able to look at?
12:20.346 --> 12:26.435
[SPEAKER_02]: I assume if you go into like a newspaper's dot com and type coffee, you're going to get way too many results to be useful.
12:26.515 --> 12:30.280
[SPEAKER_02]: So how did you go about figuring out what to look at?
12:30.732 --> 12:32.614
[SPEAKER_01]: appetizers are helpful, but you're right.
12:32.694 --> 12:37.320
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to have parameters because there's a lot of them, especially as we get closer to the 19th century.
12:37.820 --> 12:39.482
[SPEAKER_01]: But I used a range of sources.
12:39.643 --> 12:43.587
[SPEAKER_01]: I lived in Jamaica for about a year and a half to do research there.
12:43.687 --> 12:47.772
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in that place, I was looking at plantation records.
12:47.932 --> 12:56.082
[SPEAKER_01]: I was looking at whales and probative stories to get a sense and naps to get a sense
12:56.062 --> 12:57.724
[SPEAKER_01]: What kinds of people own them?
12:57.784 --> 13:01.228
[SPEAKER_01]: What sorts of labor was used to grow coffee?
13:01.749 --> 13:17.749
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when I moved into the trading section and spending a lot more time with customs papers and with naval office shipping lists and with merchants' account books to get a sense of when coffee is shipped and where coffee is shipped and in what quantities?
13:17.729 --> 13:32.458
[SPEAKER_01]: and then for the consumer side of the story I spent a fair bit of time definitely with advertisements but also in letters and diaries because it's one thing to know that people are drinking coffee but that's not the same as knowing why they're drinking coffee.
13:33.079 --> 13:38.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was interested in all of those questions and then finally I would be remiss.
13:38.249 --> 14:02.126
[SPEAKER_01]: If I didn't add that I had a before I became a historian I had a career for about eight years in museums as a curator and educator and for me material culture is still really powerful as a resource face and so I spent a lot of time looking at coffee pots and coffee cups and coffee grinders, coffee spoons, everything that's related to how you prepare coffee and how you serve coffee.
14:02.146 --> 14:06.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of those are the kinds of research resources I was interested in.
14:06.953 --> 14:14.753
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one of my favorite tidbits in the book was that the first coffee grinder to come to what's now the U.S. was on the Mayflower.
14:15.762 --> 14:28.894
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was trying to find as many tough stones as I can and when I found that mortar and pestle for grinding coffee and it's not surprising actually because many of these religious refugees were coming through Amsterdam and Holland actually became very interested.
14:28.934 --> 14:32.337
[SPEAKER_01]: The dust became very interested in property trading in the 17th century.
14:32.357 --> 14:45.769
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I thought the more I can link it to the Nape flower or to James Town, there's another reference to those who are living in James Town as well.
14:45.749 --> 15:03.640
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk a little bit about the way that coffee is grown and it's so striking that you're focused on the Americas, especially what becomes the U.S. and within the whole British colonies of North America, you cannot grow coffee.
15:03.620 --> 15:05.403
[SPEAKER_02]: How is coffee grown?
15:05.443 --> 15:13.134
[SPEAKER_02]: How is it different than the way sugar, for instance, which is also often a tropical product is is grown as maintained.
15:13.474 --> 15:15.818
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are some similarities and there are some differences.
15:15.838 --> 15:23.048
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are two commodities that they do grow up, you know, adjacent to each other, but there are some important distances to and the first one is timing.
15:23.429 --> 15:27.214
[SPEAKER_01]: So sugar comes over to the Caribbean through
15:27.194 --> 15:33.541
[SPEAKER_01]: British inferior channels, but also through French and Dutch and Spanish, all European empires are interested in sugar.
15:34.102 --> 15:36.104
[SPEAKER_01]: But it comes over earlier in the 17th century.
15:36.145 --> 15:41.691
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is a one-tastically profitable industry.
15:41.711 --> 15:48.399
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the reasons why it's gotten I think so much attention from historians as opposed to other commodities that were grown in the West Indies.
15:49.180 --> 15:51.042
[SPEAKER_01]: But it favors
15:51.022 --> 16:03.881
[SPEAKER_01]: low-lying regions, so coastal regions for the most part in Caribbean colonies, and it needs a lot of sun, it needs a lot of rain, and it processes, it requires being processed very quickly.
16:04.362 --> 16:15.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Once sugar canus cut, you've opened a time window, in which it needs to be processed, or it will begin to ferment, and once that happens, you can't use it to produce raw or refine sugar.
16:15.541 --> 16:17.485
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a 17th century story.
16:17.505 --> 16:26.902
[SPEAKER_01]: It has huge implications for the Caribbean and the people of the Caribbean because sugar is grown pretty much exclusively by enslaved labor.
16:27.363 --> 16:35.659
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the genesis of the transatlantic slave trade that repopulates the West Indies and the legacies of which you can still see today.
16:35.639 --> 16:41.066
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is a story that I think has been beautifully captured by many really strong histories.
16:41.627 --> 16:47.535
[SPEAKER_01]: Copy is similar in the sense that it is reliant on enslaved labor as well, but it comes later.
16:47.595 --> 16:55.426
[SPEAKER_01]: It arrives in the early 18th century in the 1720s, and it requires very different circumstances requiring.
16:55.867 --> 17:03.317
[SPEAKER_01]: So Copy grows best at about 2,000 feet above sea level, even better still,
17:03.297 --> 17:20.850
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they're you're looking at places in the Caribbean that have not ranges and there are a lot because these are many of these are legacies of volcanic islands So places like Jamaica or sentiment which is now hay or the Dominican Republic, which at that point was sent out of Mingo or Spanish colony
17:20.830 --> 17:27.321
[SPEAKER_01]: Cuba, many of the eastern, the smaller anteles, those have mountainous elevations, or coffee grows well.
17:27.682 --> 17:29.745
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're not going to see it in other places.
17:29.846 --> 17:40.003
[SPEAKER_01]: So coffee in the Bahamas right out, coffee in Barbados, not a good bet, because it doesn't have the right climate, it doesn't have the right growing conditions for coffee to thrive.
17:39.983 --> 17:56.035
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will say that what these two commodities have in common is very much a reliance on enslaved labor to make them work, but the scale sugar plantations usually very large, coffee farms traditionally much, much smaller, but both dependent on travel bondage.
17:56.015 --> 18:04.807
[SPEAKER_02]: There has been a lot, of course, in the news recently, about tariffs in general and tariffs and how they are affecting coffee and coffee prices.
18:05.628 --> 18:18.546
[SPEAKER_02]: But one thing that's really interesting about what you're writing about is the way that tariff and price protections have been so important to really the whole history of coffee in the Americas.
18:18.526 --> 18:27.988
[SPEAKER_02]: She talked a little bit about that and the ways that sort of unexpected ways that we see that really affecting how coffee as an industry progresses.
18:28.028 --> 18:35.485
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make you wait for Brazil even though I know that that has the closest president today's conversation.
18:35.946 --> 18:36.788
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will bring it up.
18:37.325 --> 18:41.355
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me give you three touchdowns to think of that with coffee and pricing.
18:41.936 --> 18:48.051
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first is going to be how coffee first you taint an important British imperial project.
18:48.552 --> 18:54.928
[SPEAKER_01]: So because there were other empires that were competing and because it was not
18:54.908 --> 18:59.779
[SPEAKER_01]: undertaken for the most part by planters, but the same level of means as sugar planters.
19:00.300 --> 19:02.966
[SPEAKER_01]: Early on, it needed protection, and if it was going to grow.
19:03.006 --> 19:09.981
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the characters I introduced in the book is the Nicholas Laws, who was a governor in Jamaica.
19:09.961 --> 19:15.327
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he retired, he becomes interested in different botanical experiments and coffee as one of them.
19:15.347 --> 19:19.572
[SPEAKER_01]: He's be planted the first 28 trees in a coffee trees in Jamaica.
19:20.013 --> 19:28.022
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he passed away, or soon after he passed away, a number of flanters got together and petitioned Parliament or basically tax protection.
19:28.483 --> 19:32.587
[SPEAKER_01]: What they wanted was, which they received, Parliament agreed.
19:32.607 --> 19:39.175
[SPEAKER_01]: What they wanted was that for coffee that was grown and sold within the British Empire to be tax-free.
19:39.155 --> 19:47.857
[SPEAKER_01]: and for a heavy import tax to be placed on any copy that came in from a colony other than the British Empire.
19:47.877 --> 19:54.193
[SPEAKER_01]: And they succeeded and that's part of what gave them the financial buffer to be able to grow the industry as well as they did.
19:55.338 --> 20:13.043
[SPEAKER_01]: The second moment I'm going to give you, I'm going to fast forward, so we're so used to thinking about the American Revolution as fighting against, and it was, I'm not going to say it wasn't, but fighting against efforts by Parliament to control economic activity in what becomes the United States.
20:13.023 --> 20:39.300
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sometimes surprising when I tell people that during the Revolutionary War, because of scarcity and increasing price inflation as a result, it's not surprising that during war prices would go up, there's disruptions of trade, there's efforts by both the British and the American Army to secure supplies, and so there's fewer and fewer goods to buy prices are naturally going to go up as if five goes down.
20:40.259 --> 20:46.170
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were a number of goods that the Americans threatened states.
20:46.190 --> 20:49.276
[SPEAKER_01]: They felt were necessary for everyday life.
20:49.576 --> 21:02.200
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they initially began started in New England in Massachusetts in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, but then trickles down in New York and also Pennsylvania, almost all colonies in act various forms of price.
21:02.635 --> 21:03.737
[SPEAKER_01]: structures or limits.
21:04.459 --> 21:09.890
[SPEAKER_01]: And they identify about 25 or 26 goes so they think are essential to daily life.
21:10.050 --> 21:11.072
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee is among those.
21:11.513 --> 21:16.403
[SPEAKER_01]: So to me that's a really important piece of evidence because it demonstrates that coffee has become so common.
21:16.664 --> 21:17.706
[SPEAKER_01]: T was not on that list.
21:18.027 --> 21:22.095
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee has become so common that it is an expected part of daily life.
21:22.075 --> 21:31.449
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as a result like flour and corn and peas and beef, it's going to be protected by the price tap so that people can't start charging higher and higher rates.
21:32.530 --> 21:43.206
[SPEAKER_01]: And the third example, which does bring us up to today's thoughts on coffee and tariffs, is closer to the end of my book.
21:43.658 --> 22:03.152
[SPEAKER_01]: most of my book focuses on North American West Indian commerce, but my last chapter I had to take a tour because by the 1830s, Brazil had really begun to emerge as this leading power house in coffee production, and in 1832, I think it became effective in 33.
22:03.537 --> 22:11.951
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a group that have joined together to petition Congress to abolish all taxes and tariffs on imported copy.
22:12.271 --> 22:13.373
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're doing it for two reasons.
22:13.433 --> 22:18.922
[SPEAKER_01]: First, the copy importers are seriously interested because this will give them a global advantage.
22:18.942 --> 22:22.288
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're joined interestingly enough by temperance movement.
22:22.268 --> 22:28.838
[SPEAKER_01]: who are trying to find an alternative to alcohol that is a beverage that can be broadly embraced, right, and promote it.
22:29.319 --> 22:37.011
[SPEAKER_01]: So these two groups come together and successfully petitioned for the United States to become the only nation in the world that did not tax coffee.
22:37.031 --> 22:47.888
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was that combination of US importation and increasing Brazilian production that created candidly a partnership that persisted this day.
22:47.868 --> 22:50.894
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a fascinating history.
22:50.974 --> 22:54.181
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, what you just said about the temperance movement.
22:54.201 --> 23:03.218
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's really interesting to think about how little moralizing there is about coffee compared to alcohol when they're both highly addictive.
23:03.639 --> 23:04.020
[SPEAKER_02]: There.
23:04.000 --> 23:08.069
[SPEAKER_02]: they're both as you mention, reliant on enslaved labor.
23:08.109 --> 23:17.329
[SPEAKER_02]: In this case, it's a product that does not even grow within the continental U.S. Was it just that they're looking for sort of non-alcohol sources?
23:17.389 --> 23:20.916
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it just the losing battle to try to fight against coffee?
23:20.957 --> 23:23.983
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what's your sense of what was going on there?
23:25.077 --> 23:27.100
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is some pushback.
23:27.581 --> 23:28.843
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, let's talk about addiction.
23:29.203 --> 23:37.535
[SPEAKER_01]: There's fairly early on, I mean, by the late 16, even 17th century in Europe, there's a recognition that coffee has an impact on the body.
23:38.116 --> 23:44.946
[SPEAKER_01]: Mind you, some of the accounts from that early are amusing in terms of what they think, how coffee impacts the body.
23:45.487 --> 23:47.490
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's various kinds of medical literature.
23:47.825 --> 23:57.143
[SPEAKER_01]: some of those who support Coffee's Consumptioner saying it's, you know, great for everything from Typhoid to Latchelons, I'm not joking, but then there's a whole other range.
23:57.663 --> 24:04.833
[SPEAKER_01]: of pamphlets and writers who are arguing that coffee causes infertility, that coffee causes imponence.
24:05.294 --> 24:15.489
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's even a recognition that because it's an important good in Western Europe and then certainly in North America, that coffee causes dependence, that becomes associated with this word dependence really, really on.
24:15.969 --> 24:26.725
[SPEAKER_01]: So you definitely have practitioners who are not necessarily always fancy coffee as early
24:28.105 --> 24:32.749
[SPEAKER_01]: cookbooks don't become regularly published in North America until the 19th century.
24:32.789 --> 24:39.576
[SPEAKER_01]: There are some lady-cancensary examples, but for the most part of these important books that were coming from England, primarily.
24:39.976 --> 24:55.851
[SPEAKER_01]: But even there you have people who are beginning to distinguish between coffee, coffee, fruit, fruit, children, coffee, food for people who are ill, coffee, fruit for the elderly, because there's a recognition that caffeine can have a different impact depending on who you are,
24:55.831 --> 24:57.414
[SPEAKER_01]: and what you help is not.
24:57.915 --> 25:08.155
[SPEAKER_01]: But I wanted to return to one of the aspects of that, which is this question about the association of coffee with slavery, because it is.
25:08.215 --> 25:15.730
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a wonderful, if I had more time, and it might be another project, a published one article about it, but it could use a book.
25:17.077 --> 25:26.814
[SPEAKER_01]: Their coffee does become not quite as prominently as sugar, but certainly with sugar, one of the primary targets of the pre-produce movement of the early 19th century.
25:26.934 --> 25:29.318
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's an arm of the abolition movement.
25:29.338 --> 25:35.188
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're looking for ways that you can try to find coffee that's not produced by enslaved hands.
25:36.089 --> 25:41.278
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's easier for something like tea, which is produced in China or India.
25:42.828 --> 25:47.192
[SPEAKER_01]: not by what I would call free labor but not by enslaved labor.
25:47.212 --> 25:48.734
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee is more challenging.
25:49.354 --> 26:00.345
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not until after the Haitian Revolution and Haiti gains independence but the French empire that you really have a large potential producer of free coffee.
26:00.726 --> 26:11.316
[SPEAKER_01]: The challenge there is that the United States, like most of Western Europe, chooses to boycott Haiti because it is the
26:12.443 --> 26:24.475
[SPEAKER_01]: But you will find and trying to promote things like Chickery, or everything is, I mean, really our efforts to try to grow copy at North America to lessen our defendants and have a free, free label option.
26:24.936 --> 26:33.324
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're trying to burn Rye and Wee, and create a cup as one abolitionist template says.
26:33.584 --> 26:35.026
[SPEAKER_01]: They give all of these various options.
26:35.046 --> 26:37.908
[SPEAKER_01]: You can try burning Rye, you can try roasting Wee.
26:38.349 --> 26:42.433
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these are very good.
26:42.920 --> 26:43.842
[SPEAKER_02]: No, nothing.
26:43.862 --> 26:48.629
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like coffee, you mentioned the material aspect culture.
26:48.750 --> 26:50.713
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if you could talk some about that.
26:50.973 --> 27:07.881
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, coffee, of course, is striking because people of all social classes eventually drink it and drink it in huge numbers, but the way they're preparing it, the way they're consuming it, the thinking around coffee and the rituals that go with it can be very different.
27:07.861 --> 27:12.325
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is what I hope is one of the big takeaways from the book.
27:12.345 --> 27:26.558
[SPEAKER_01]: My argument is that because coffee is less expensive for pound than tea throughout the colonial period, or than chocolate for that matter, significantly less, many, many more people drank coffee, then drank those other beverages.
27:27.259 --> 27:28.380
[SPEAKER_01]: But how they drank it?
27:28.880 --> 27:30.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Very significant one.
27:30.982 --> 27:35.286
[SPEAKER_01]: At the top end of the scale, I was looking at a range of different materials and price points.
27:35.266 --> 27:41.362
[SPEAKER_01]: At the top of the scale you have something like Sterling Silver, which is extremely expensive, right?
27:41.402 --> 27:47.478
[SPEAKER_01]: A very small percentage of North America's population could afford a Sterling Silver set.
27:48.220 --> 27:50.406
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will point out, and I do in the book that
27:50.386 --> 27:57.298
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were going to have a full sterling set, you would have a coffee pot, a tea pot, a creamer, a sugar, sugar tongs, a trade.
27:57.518 --> 28:00.403
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a wide range of a company that's a second come with it.
28:00.704 --> 28:02.026
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an expensive investment.
28:02.447 --> 28:14.267
[SPEAKER_01]: But bearing in mind that a coffee pot is usually about twice the size of a tea pot, a coffee pot will always be the most expensive object in that set because it just takes that much more metal to create, right?
28:15.344 --> 28:16.425
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were other options.
28:16.906 --> 28:28.179
[SPEAKER_01]: After plating became very commonplace, metal plating, you could have silver plated copy and T services, and candidly by the end of the year, it can central you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
28:28.339 --> 28:38.791
[SPEAKER_01]: Once they come across a process called shut the up plating that bonds silver with other metals to a base metal, you could not only coat the outside but the exterior, the underneath.
28:39.432 --> 28:44.878
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, only if you picked it up and you knew the weight difference would you know that you're not
28:44.858 --> 28:51.128
[SPEAKER_01]: But copyfats also come in imported ceramics, in stonewares, in painted tinware.
28:51.688 --> 28:57.277
[SPEAKER_01]: Really any price point along the line, you can find copy of clipage that's going to match it.
28:57.778 --> 29:01.684
[SPEAKER_01]: So I will also add there are these moments in the archive.
29:01.704 --> 29:03.787
[SPEAKER_01]: You probably get this from others figures.
29:03.807 --> 29:09.195
[SPEAKER_01]: There are these moments in the archive when you find something you think, oh, that's going to make an amazing
29:09.175 --> 29:12.040
[SPEAKER_01]: The letters of Mary Schiffen are one of those for me.
29:12.160 --> 29:15.184
[SPEAKER_01]: She was married to Joseph Schiffen, the Schiffen family.
29:15.204 --> 29:20.813
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very prominent in Philadelphia, very, very doctors, lawyers, very well-off.
29:20.833 --> 29:24.940
[SPEAKER_01]: But she's visiting a family of relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
29:25.901 --> 29:30.829
[SPEAKER_01]: And she writes back to her husband Joseph, that for the most part, she's found the visit to be lovely.
29:30.809 --> 29:40.304
[SPEAKER_01]: But she did notice that her hostess when she is setting out afternoon coffee and doesn't have enough cups for everyone in the room will add teacups so that everybody has a vessel, right?
29:40.324 --> 29:48.937
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's a little appalled by it and she reminds her that her own copy service set is chipped and she implores Joseph to buy replacements.
29:48.957 --> 29:52.142
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason I love to this story so much is it tells me a couple of minutes.
29:52.122 --> 30:02.501
[SPEAKER_01]: It tells me that there are families who are already invested in coffee and coffee consumption that they need and want a full set and they recognize the difference when they don't have it.
30:03.623 --> 30:07.650
[SPEAKER_01]: But it also tells me that people in Lancaster Pennsylvania are family.
30:07.630 --> 30:08.671
[SPEAKER_01]: are just making do.
30:08.872 --> 30:10.594
[SPEAKER_01]: They also are coffee with what they have.
30:11.115 --> 30:20.949
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not required that you have all the equipment, but if you have the means and you feel like you have the social standing that that kind of that it can is expected, it has been important.
30:20.969 --> 30:27.478
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course that's all the same today if people drink coffee at all sorts of different price points with all sorts of
30:27.458 --> 30:57.094
[SPEAKER_02]: for an equipment and is so I want to go back to talking about coffee houses where we began, you know, I think that certainly many of us know how important and ubiquitous coffee shops are now have worked in several of myself when I was in grad school, but I think what we think of as the coffee shop now while it may have connections to the coffee houses that you're talking about which in the pre-revolutionary revolutionary time is not exactly the same kind of place.
30:57.074 --> 31:06.283
[SPEAKER_02]: described what that was like the importance of those places, not just as a place to get and drink coffee, but as an actual social space.
31:07.324 --> 31:10.627
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a question that I grappled with a lot when I was writing this book.
31:10.647 --> 31:11.508
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the distinction?
31:11.568 --> 31:15.532
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the difference between an in a tower and a tower and a tower and a tower?
31:15.993 --> 31:26.423
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it was just really lovely letter that was written by an author who was nephew when he first moved to Philadelphia in the 1760s.
31:26.403 --> 31:28.807
[SPEAKER_01]: don't trifle your time away at the top at the table.
31:29.267 --> 31:31.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't trifle your time away at games of chance.
31:31.751 --> 31:36.118
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to be taken seriously as a man of business, get yourself to a coffee house.
31:36.899 --> 31:37.960
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a reason why.
31:39.222 --> 31:51.060
[SPEAKER_01]: When you called yourself a coffee house, you were conveying something to the public about what you were and the kinds of activities you supported all of these places.
31:51.665 --> 31:52.727
[SPEAKER_01]: surf food and beverage.
31:53.528 --> 31:54.750
[SPEAKER_01]: And please don't misunderstand.
31:54.810 --> 31:56.672
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee houses didn't just surf coffee.
31:56.933 --> 31:59.577
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not how they were like today's coffee houses.
31:59.617 --> 32:03.503
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a full range of beverages usually, including alcohol.
32:03.723 --> 32:07.068
[SPEAKER_01]: I only found one coffee house that didn't have a liquor license it closed in two years.
32:07.869 --> 32:09.451
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a full menu of food.
32:09.932 --> 32:14.719
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they offer accommodation as well in the same way that ins and taverns them.
32:14.739 --> 32:16.542
[SPEAKER_01]: But the ways that they were different
32:16.825 --> 32:22.900
[SPEAKER_01]: is that coffee houses, and they call themselves a coffee house, because they were associating themselves as a place of business.
32:23.742 --> 32:31.260
[SPEAKER_01]: They housed many of the activities that ultimately would become different industries, but weren't in the 18th century in the colonial theory.
32:31.881 --> 32:34.648
[SPEAKER_01]: So, coffee houses are places where
32:35.658 --> 32:37.601
[SPEAKER_01]: currency exchange was compared.
32:37.641 --> 32:39.284
[SPEAKER_01]: They would have regular exchange days.
32:39.624 --> 32:43.771
[SPEAKER_01]: So currency from around, not only the empire, but around multiple empires, right?
32:43.791 --> 32:50.983
[SPEAKER_01]: These are places of trade, for merchants and traders or meaty would be posted, so that you would know what their relative value.
32:50.963 --> 32:53.668
[SPEAKER_01]: They were places of information gathering.
32:53.748 --> 32:55.051
[SPEAKER_01]: They kept business directways.
32:55.431 --> 32:57.074
[SPEAKER_01]: They kept newspapers of Egyptians.
32:57.555 --> 33:10.820
[SPEAKER_01]: One copyhouse is advertising that they spend over 400 pounds a year on newspaper subscriptions so that their members can be aware of what's happening around the world, where there's political unrest, where there might be environmental events or hurricanes, what's it fashion?
33:11.241 --> 33:12.904
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, these are all things they need to know.
33:12.884 --> 33:15.007
[SPEAKER_01]: They served as places of maritime insurance.
33:15.027 --> 33:16.850
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't a separate insurance industry.
33:16.890 --> 33:22.057
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you wanted to get insurance for your ship, usually you were procuring it at a coffee house.
33:22.077 --> 33:29.568
[SPEAKER_01]: So by setting themselves up this way, by calling themselves by that moniker, they were basically saying, we are places of business.
33:29.708 --> 33:32.732
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is our primary set of activities.
33:33.387 --> 33:48.372
[SPEAKER_02]: We've mentioned that coffee is not something that is grown within what becomes the US, but you do demonstrate that there are coffee brands that are US brands that start to really deliberately sell themselves as all-American.
33:48.853 --> 33:51.096
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a big part of their advertising.
33:51.677 --> 33:52.819
[SPEAKER_02]: You talk some about that.
33:52.899 --> 33:59.310
[SPEAKER_02]: What it is that they're trying to do, they're in other succeeding in that with a product that of course is grown somewhere else.
33:59.864 --> 34:09.079
[SPEAKER_01]: The interesting thing is, so if I was going to take coffee where coffee production and put it into three big chapters, these would be day.
34:09.580 --> 34:16.050
[SPEAKER_01]: In the colonial period, but the most part, when North Americans are drinking coffee, they're drinking coffee in the British Empire.
34:16.070 --> 34:24.724
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm early from Jamaica, or after the seven years were when Britain gets the seeded islands from France, from places like Dominica, or Grenada, or St. Vincent.
34:24.704 --> 34:37.736
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you had copy from somewhere else, you were sure to advertise it, particularly if you had copy from the East Indies from places like Java or Revol or from French Sunday.
34:38.336 --> 34:41.960
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you do get to see a moniker associated in advertising with copy.
34:41.980 --> 34:48.806
[SPEAKER_01]: Normally in an ad from this 18th century copy is literally just copy, one of 60 goods that a shopkeeper is of a stint.
34:49.126 --> 34:54.711
[SPEAKER_01]: But if they had French copy or if they had Java copy, they would make sure to tell
34:54.691 --> 34:59.659
[SPEAKER_01]: In the post-revolutionary period, I'm going to get to your American branding and a moment I promise.
35:00.300 --> 35:06.431
[SPEAKER_01]: In the post-revolutionary period, when the United States is no longer a part of the British Empire, they're looking around for different partners.
35:06.872 --> 35:11.940
[SPEAKER_01]: And so then, again, naming is important because if you're importing coffee from
35:11.920 --> 35:32.241
[SPEAKER_01]: Cuba or from or from sentiment before the the Haitian Revolution or from Puerto Rico, you're going to actually advertise where it comes from because again people have already begun to distinguish differences in taste and sophistication in terms of brewing technique or bursting techniques from these different places, but
35:33.031 --> 35:44.996
[SPEAKER_01]: by the 19th century and again, particularly after the 1830s and the United States very close affiliation with Brazil, almost all of our copy, well over 90% of our copies coming from that one supplier.
35:45.958 --> 35:51.630
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you see in the advertising is a really interesting shift rather than focusing on Brazilian copies.
35:52.842 --> 35:56.092
[SPEAKER_01]: copy itself, become free-made as an American product.
35:56.473 --> 35:58.319
[SPEAKER_01]: For two reasons, I would argue.
35:58.760 --> 36:02.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Number one, we're not just importing copy for ourselves, right?
36:02.551 --> 36:07.105
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the United States, we're importing copy to re-export around the world.
36:07.253 --> 36:12.201
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're taking a Brazilian commodity and we're remaking it into an American export.
36:12.822 --> 36:20.114
[SPEAKER_01]: To do that, you need to have faith in the American companies that are importing it, packaging it, and selling it to you.
36:20.635 --> 36:28.688
[SPEAKER_01]: So in that repackaging, it's very important for these merchants to emphasize their United States origins.
36:28.887 --> 36:35.415
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, by extension, that same overlay stills out onto the domestic company scene as well.
36:35.815 --> 36:39.399
[SPEAKER_01]: Coffee becomes literally promoted as this all-American beverage.
36:39.459 --> 36:54.557
[SPEAKER_01]: And you see that in the advertising language, you see that in the advertising imagery, this affiliation of coffee with the past presidents, with eagles, and with other sites of nationalism, other signs of nationalism.
36:54.537 --> 37:22.688
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's a very deliberate effort and it's repeated in company after company after company, so that, rather than saying, we are proudly selling you, resilient coffee, it is your proudly selling you on American coffee, even though there was one beautiful coffee box I found, tin box I found that says United States coffee from its own
37:22.668 --> 37:30.095
[SPEAKER_01]: At the moment of first of sight, I thought to myself that's because you couldn't grow copy in the United States until you redefined what the United States was.
37:30.615 --> 37:36.340
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you could claim that we had a domestic source of coffee, but it could never compete with something like Brazil.
37:37.261 --> 37:40.104
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that public history is really important to you.
37:40.124 --> 37:52.675
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if you could talk about the different forms that takes and you know, do you find that studying things like coffee helps with
37:52.655 --> 37:52.781
[UNKNOWN]: You
37:53.650 --> 37:54.411
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely.
37:54.631 --> 37:58.195
[SPEAKER_01]: So public history for me, I should say, so I mentioned I have a museum back now.
37:58.575 --> 38:05.763
[SPEAKER_01]: I've also spent a lot of time doing works with teacher education programs, with school groups, and all of that informs my current job.
38:05.903 --> 38:13.271
[SPEAKER_01]: I now direct a library in museum, which is fantastic way of combining my best professional lives into one nice package.
38:13.291 --> 38:23.202
[SPEAKER_01]: But to me, the distinction between public history and academic history, not as stark as it used to be,
38:23.587 --> 38:37.982
[SPEAKER_01]: So academic history is your more traditional thinking about publications for a tick-bop teaching or for college teaching or for other historians, whereas public history has, as its name implies, a mandate to think about as broader reaches possible.
38:38.543 --> 38:44.409
[SPEAKER_01]: To do that, I think it's especially helpful to start with a question that many people would find and gauge it.
38:44.950 --> 38:45.170
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
38:45.290 --> 38:47.232
[SPEAKER_01]: If I started with the question,
38:47.212 --> 38:53.275
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, how does the United States restructure its trade networks in the early 19th century?
38:53.316 --> 38:58.656
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not going to grab people as much as, say, what is the history of copy trading?
38:59.108 --> 39:00.411
[SPEAKER_01]: Where does your coffee come from?
39:00.451 --> 39:02.736
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that differ than where it came from in the past?
39:03.277 --> 39:06.644
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a much more engaging interest point.
39:06.664 --> 39:11.054
[SPEAKER_01]: I think for a general public about, what is it, in fact, a very complicated story?
39:11.074 --> 39:17.207
[SPEAKER_02]: I would like to encourage listeners to read your book and learn about that history of coffee.
39:17.267 --> 39:18.670
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you tell them how they can do that?
39:19.325 --> 39:25.272
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, the title of the book is Coffey Nation, how one commodity transformed the early United States.
39:25.833 --> 39:37.626
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was published by the University of Pennsylvania, so you can find it on their website, but you can also find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, on many other any website that would sell books that book here.
39:37.807 --> 39:39.168
[SPEAKER_01]: So I hope you do think about it.
39:39.629 --> 39:46.817
[SPEAKER_01]: If you love coffee or if you know somebody else who loves coffee, I'd like to think that it would make an excellent gift as we move with holiday season.
39:46.797 --> 39:49.941
[SPEAKER_02]: I think everyone must know, at least one person that loves coffee.
39:50.601 --> 39:52.844
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?
39:53.685 --> 40:05.218
[SPEAKER_01]: The other reason I really like this topic, and I particularly like it as we're coming up to 2026, which is the two-fifth year course of the Declaration of Independence, and if you didn't know that by now, congratulations next year, is the two-fifth year.
40:05.859 --> 40:11.505
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes in a really nice time to think about some of our re-thinks of our American myths.
40:11.587 --> 40:20.222
[SPEAKER_01]: So when people think about the American Revolution and these iconic stories, one of them that almost immediately comes to mind is the Boston Tea Party.
40:21.364 --> 40:24.730
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not going to say that I don't like Boston, I dislike the Tea Party.
40:25.110 --> 40:27.594
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to say I'm from Philadelphia and Boston Philadelphia.
40:27.615 --> 40:29.658
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a big rivalry where it comes to the Tea Party.
40:29.698 --> 40:31.401
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not why I'm making this argument.
40:32.427 --> 40:46.513
[SPEAKER_01]: The Boston Tea Party is cast as this moment of American bravery, right, of this underdog, going against the machinery of empire, breaking on the ships of night and destroying what would become a really hated commodity that represented parliamentary control.
40:47.615 --> 40:49.238
[SPEAKER_01]: I start my book.
40:49.218 --> 40:59.400
[SPEAKER_01]: very deliberately, and this was another aha moment in the archives, very deliberately with a story that I found in the letters from Abigail Adams, to her husband, John Adams.
40:59.981 --> 41:03.970
[SPEAKER_01]: She was living in Boston, but time when he was in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress.
41:04.709 --> 41:15.929
[SPEAKER_01]: And the story she recounted was of women lining up outside a warehouse, owned by a man named Thomas Foyleston, and demanding that he opened it because they knew he was keeping coffee.
41:16.290 --> 41:26.869
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was when price controls had gone into a fact, so he had removed his cropping which stores for a very long time off of the market, so he didn't have to sell it at these deflated prices.
41:26.849 --> 41:28.975
[SPEAKER_01]: but then they couldn't find any coffee at all the buy.
41:29.016 --> 41:37.662
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they lined up, they demanded his keys, they went into his warehouse, they took the coffee out, and then they gave it to the city to sell it at the regulated prices.
41:38.264 --> 41:39.407
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't destroy it.
41:39.674 --> 41:51.450
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't steal it, they kept it, and they distributed it for people to purchase at Fair Rates, and to me, when you line these two stories upside by upside, they're interesting.
41:52.191 --> 42:07.993
[SPEAKER_01]: One is a very in some ways masculine story, right, of men who are under cover of night conducting this secretive attack against a British Empire, but this was a group of women who
42:08.463 --> 42:09.764
[SPEAKER_01]: are demanding what they want.
42:09.965 --> 42:11.867
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they wanted was coffee.
42:12.968 --> 42:27.424
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, these two stories are a beautiful way to think about how much more diverse the impact of the American Revolution was on every day people and how much more complex that story is, how much more than it is to learn.
42:27.965 --> 42:30.087
[SPEAKER_02]: Michelle, thank you so much for speaking with me.
42:30.127 --> 42:37.035
[SPEAKER_02]: I loved learning more about my beloved
42:37.015 --> 42:37.937
[SPEAKER_02]: It was my pleasure.
42:38.017 --> 42:53.691
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much for having me.
43:10.630 --> 43:12.592
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
43:13.373 --> 43:16.898
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
43:17.378 --> 43:22.865
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript at UnSungHistoryPodcast.com.
43:23.486 --> 43:29.553
[SPEAKER_00]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by UnSungHistory are in the public domain or are used with permission.
43:30.394 --> 43:36.722
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find us on Instagram at UnSungUnderScoreUunderScoreHistory or on Facebook at UnSungHistoryPodcast.
43:37.276 --> 43:40.973
[SPEAKER_00]: The contact is with questions, corrections, praise, or absolute suggestions.
43:41.435 --> 43:43.967
[SPEAKER_00]: Please email Kelliette on site historypunkest.com.
43:44.730 --> 43:48.689
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.
43:49.071 --> 43:49.412
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!
