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Omaha Institute and The Great Courses Plus. The bah bahpah bah bah bah bah dah bah dah bah dahhahhahhah kahhah kahh kahh kahh kahhahhahhah Throughout the 18th century, T played a central role in the economic, cultural and political lives of early Americans.

And as a result of its centrality, T developed a complicated

economic and political history. In fact, because of its complicated economic and

political history, T came to play a sizable role in the escalating tensions between Great Britain and her 13

British North American colonies during the 1760s and 1770s.

Now you may recall that in episode 112, the very first episode in the Doing History to the Revolution series,

we had a conversation with Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Dunlin Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University,

who shared with us the story of the 7th T ship.

And during our conversation, Mary Beth shared with us the important role that T played in

colonial British American culture.

All the contemporary observers said that Americans drank prodigious, that was a word that I picked up from the documents, prodigious amounts of tea, and that all parts of American society at the time did just

a amount of tea and that all parts of American society at the time were addicted to tea.

There's even a wonderful account of a foreign traveler on the frontier

seeing Mohawk Indians drinking tea. So everybody seems to have drunk a lot of tea, but there's also a real cultural and social meaning to tea in the 18th century in North America.

It's valued for its role in women socializing.

I mean, the standard belief at the time

was that men socialized in taverns over ale and women socialized over tea in their homes.

And so there's a massive amount of literature about the cultural significance of tea parties.

As early as the 1720s people in newspapers are

parodying women in Tea Parties supervising, having tea very genteelie with their friends, with women, and some men, and socializing and gossiping.

There's a whole parody of women gossipers, and there's a lot of complaints about women gossiping over tea and

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