Coffee Nation Book Talk

5:30 PM Refreshments
6:00 PM Book Talk
at NSCDA/PA Headquarters 1630 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103


Please join Michelle Craig McDonald, Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society for a conversation about "Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States"

NSCDA/PA members, their spouses and guests are cordially invited to attend a presentation by Michelle Craig McDonald, the Director of the Library & Museum of the American Philosophical Society on her new book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Copies will be available for purchase.

Coffee is among the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide, and so omnipresent its popularity is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history. When and why coffee become part of North American’s daily life is at the center of Coffee Nation. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, McDonald follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.

NSCDA Pennsylvania is located at 1630 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, PA. The evening begins with a welcome reception at 5:30pm, and the program starts at 6:00pm.