These Truths

Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 and the oldest learned society in North America. The APS has more than 14 million pages of manuscripts and 300,000 printed volumes, with particular strengths in early American history, the history of science, and Native American and Indigenous cultures. Dr. McDonald earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She also holds a master’s in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis, a master’s in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and a bachelor’s in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. She is the co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her current monograph, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025.

Patrick Spero is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society. As a scholar of early American history, he specializes in the era of the American Revolution, and has published over a dozen essays and reviews on the topic. He is the author of Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 (Norton, 2018), and of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania, and The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century, both of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.