From Coffee to Coffee House

  

I try to learn something new about coffee every day. My librarian spouse and I enjoy book talks. And our dog Crumpet loves story time. I snapped this photo in our reading room as we settled in for a virtual event that checked all of these boxes. Even better, the featured author is both an historian and a librarian! 

As you can see, we had a very content canine, and we were all happy to have learned of this particular author talk, and that we were able to fit it in just before I took off for a brief visit with our Maryland family. 

As always, it is through the kindness of friends and colleagues that I do manage to learn something small or large about coffee nearly every day. This day, it was large! A colleague in our English department let me know about a presentation by Michelle Craig McDonald at a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society. 

Bonus lesson: I had heard of AAS, but had no idea that it is based in Worcester, Massachusetts. I might have made that trip, but the timing was not good for that, so I'm grateful that her discussion of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States would be online -- Crumpet was glad as well. She's much happier to watch an author talk from Pam's recliner than to hear about it after we've left her alone. 

As she explains during the talk, Professor McDonald is a business historian who had noticed a gap in the coffee literature. Finding gaps is one way that scholars figure out what to study: read all you can in a particular field, and you will eventually figure out what has not been written. In this case, she found that a lot of work had been done on the spread of coffee cultivation and production and also a lot on the spread of coffee consumption. But the literature on growers largely assumes a market and the literature on markets largely assumes growers. The two bodies of literature were not talking to each other in her view, though I would argue that Mark Pendergrast's 1999 Uncommon Grounds does make a contribution in this area. Real coffee nerds will be able to discern that she read the second edition of his book. 

I was even more pleased to see that the talk was available immediately afterward, so I can share it with students in my Secret Life of Coffee seminar. I am particularly interested in them hearing her discussion of the rise of coffee houses and their once-important role in commerce. On the production side, her explanation of the rise and fall of coffee production in Haiti is particularly helpful. 

This book is, of course, going on my reading list!