Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States

Virtual Book Talk!

Coffee is among the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide, and so omnipresent its popularity is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history. When and why coffee became part of North American daily life is at the center of the recently published book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, by Michelle Craig McDonald.

Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, Michelle Craig McDonald follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Get tickets to receive the Zoom link.

Questions? Contact Jen Busa, Public Programs Coordinator at jbusa@connecticutmuseum.org.

About the Speaker: Michelle Craig McDonald is the Director of the Library & Museum for the American Philosophical Society, and her research focuses on trade and consumer behavior in North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. Her most recent book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in May 2025, based on research supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Library and Museum. In addition to her doctorate from the University of Michigan, she holds an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University, a B.A. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School

To purchase the book:  Coffee Nation – Penn Press