Following the Tet Offensive, the struggle to define the war intensified. The most widespread antiwar activity during 1968 was mobilizing behind the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Peace forces coalesced at the beginning of 1968 for what many perceived as a quixotic effort to replace a president who had promised peace with one who would actually secure peace. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race in late March inspired a realistic potential for an antiwar Democratic Party nominee. Kennedy’s death in early June ended that hope, however, and strained the collaboration between movement insiders and outsiders. Street demonstrations and growing dissent within the military worked in conjunction with persistent critics within the federal government. Liberal emphasis on electoral campaigns reduced their impact in the national coalition. Leftists, radicals, and the counterculture played a greater role in the spring National Mobilization, the nationwide student strikes, and the August confrontation in Chicago. The government used the courts to deter ongoing draft resistance but without noticeable effect.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

Although there may be little evidence that Schoenberg regularly frequented Vienna’s mythic coffeehouses, this is perhaps understandable given his famous work ethic. This chapter reveals the centrality of café life to his circle of radical modernists, offering evidence of some surprising characteristics of the composer’s early professional and personal life, as well as the distinctive social differences between certain Vienna cafés and their habitués.

This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.