Philadelphia’s coffeehouses were major sites of political activity and debate around the time of the Declaration of Independence. It would not be wrong to describe the American Revolution as the world’s first caffeine-fueled rebellion. In this conversation, Michelle Craig McDonald (American Philosophical Society), author of the forthcoming Penn Press book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States (Penn Press, May 2025), and Emma Hart (MacNeil Center for Early American Studies and History) will discuss the vital connections between Independence and the hot beverage that still gets most of us out of bed in the morning.