The William L. Clements Library; the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center; and the U.S. at 250 program invite you to join a three-part series titled "Drinking the Revolution," exploring the role of beverages in Revolutionary America and the Early Republic. The first lecture will take place on **Thursday, Jan. 22nd, 4-5:30pm in the Hatcher Gallery. **Join us in person or via zoom.

Thursday, January 22nd, 4:00-5:30pm

The Invention of Rum in a Era of Revolution | Jordan Smith, Assistant Professor of History, Widener University

Jordan Smith, Assistant Professor of History at Widener University, presents a new story of how rum was invented, made, sold, and consumed in the Atlantic world, and how those developments intersected with the American Revolution. He’ll introduce you to a commodity that itself revolutionized the Atlantic world in large part due to its ubiquity and affordability, and will home in on various moments in the leadup, course, and aftermath of the American Revolution when the market for — and meanings embedded within — rum shaped the age of revolutions. The talk builds on Jordan’s 2025 book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity.

Wednesday, February 11th, 4:00-5:30pm

When and why coffee became part of North American daily life is at the center of McDonald’s recently published book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, she follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.

Thursday, March 26th, 4:00-5:30PM

The scope and significance of practices that had been so central to the revolutionary struggle shifted in the early republic, as Americans wrestled with the promise and problems of republican self-government. Although the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement would soon frame tavern-going as the habit of dangerously shiftless men, in the republic’s early decades, entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men — and some women! — went to taverns to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and put republican self-government into practice.