I hope that readers “just browsing” the book would start on page 1. I deliberately used one of my interesting historical examples to catch readers’ attention. The book’s introduction begins with the story of women gathering in front of a warehouse in Boston early in the morning of July 24, 1777, just a little over a year after North America’s 13 colonies had declared their independence. By the time the building’s owner, local merchant Thomas Boylston, arrived more than 100 women were waiting for him. I like this story for several reasons. First, it shifts the focus for readers from tea to other goods. It also explores how women behaved in political ways—and too often their stories are left out of revolutionary histories. For years, the city’s residents had complained about the cost of their groceries and not without good reason. Since Boston passed its non-importation agreement in 1768 to protest the Townshend Duties, the price of almost everything had skyrocketed. The situation only got worse after the outbreak of war. Abigail Adams was in Boston at this time while her husband John was in Philadelphia, and frequently wrote to him about the challenges of living in a city under siege, as well as Bostonians’ growing irritation with importers and shopkeepers. “There is a general cry against the Merchants,” she’d written him earlier that year, “who ‘tis said have created a partial scarcity for “every article not only of Luxury, but even the necessaries of life.” John Adams, however, from his perspective as a political leader, saw things very differently. Writing back to his wife Abigail, he hoped that “the females will leave off their attachment to coffee” as it created, he argued, an untenable dependence on foreign trade. “I assure you,” he concluded, that “the best families in this place have left off in a great measure the use of West India goods. We must bring ourselves to live upon the produce of our own country.”That did not happen, of course, and coffee drinking only grew during the years of the war and the decades that followed. Who, when, and how Americans drank coffee are the subjects of the book’s chapters.This was not an easy book to write. There were no big coffee merchants, in the way that there were sugar, wine, or linen merchants until the early nineteenth century. Instead, I wove the history of coffee together from brief notices, that some number of barrels or bags arrived in port, that friends met for coffee in each others’ homes, or went to the coffeehouse for the latest political news. Through glimpses in account books, letters and diaries, newspaper advertisements, and—in the case of smuggling—court records.But the sheer volume of these references demonstrates coffee’s omnipresence in colonial America and the young United States—it quickly becomes apparent that the drink is everywhere—if you care to look. I hope that Coffee Nation will remind readers that history is all around us. It is not limited to big events or important names. Everyday actions are the result of choices, some made consciously, such as what kind of coffee to buy, but others resulting from years—even decades—of decisions by others, such as where to trade, what to import, and to tax. All of these factors affect what is available for purchasers to select from. We live in an interconnected world—not only before the American Revolution, but also to this day.