Coffee replaced tea as the U.S. drink of choice around the time of the American Revolution. From the moment patriots tossed chests of tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, drinking coffee—and boycotting tea—became a sure sign of loyalty to the cause of independence. Pretty soon, the country was obsessed: By the 1830s, coffee consumption was outstripping tea by five to one. In 1832, Andrew Jackson replaced army alcohol rations with coffee, in hopes of energizing the troops and reducing instances of drunken insubordination. By 1860, the U.S. was importing six pounds of the stuff each year for every man, woman and child in the country—and at the outbreak of the Civil War, Americans were drinking twice as much coffee as they were 30 years before.
But the war introduced a problem for the Union’s coffee drinkers. The sudden demand for more coffee as a crucial army provision combined with the blockade of the Southern ports created a crisis. What the Union could import was hardly enough to keep its army supplied, let alone to caffeinate Northern civilians in the manner to which they’d become accustomed.
How might we value the provincial as much as we value the cosmopolitan? What would it take for the phrase “he is so provincial” to have the same affect as “he is so worldly”? Roy is trying to show how cosmopolitan the provincial can be—that the local has embedded within it a world, and that provinciality is a better alternative to nationalist fervor.
We grow estranged from our younger selves at our peril. This warning sits at the centre of Lucy Foulkes’s excellent and insightful new book, Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us. Making space for the pain, mistakes and even trauma from the past is essential for our self-perception as adults, even if it may seem safer to edit them out. You also may miss the pleasure and fun of it too.
No century demonstrated this as much as the 17th century, in which the imperial powers of Europe began to extend their reach to all parts of globe, conquering everything in their path. Often described as the Age of Reason, it was a period in which human intellectual achievement made some of its greatest advances.
But British historian Paul Strathern claims it was undermined by a “far murkier world of instinctive impulse and dark irrational drives”.