Tea

As I was talking to my boyfriend yesterday, I told him about these two articles on tea. "That sounds really boring" he said. I quickly defended tea by exclaiming that tea completely transformed the world. In his disbelief at my seeming over exaggerated statement he said to me "It's just tea, how could it do that?" Honestly, that's a very good question. It's a hot drink that, in my mind, is way inferior to coffee. I was amazed at how the history and the politics behind tea really did transform a nation. It created industry, social rituals and had an affect on the whole temperance of a nation. To me, this is just another example of what you can learn from history from seemingly unconventional sources. Just like when we read the articles on inventory and goods of colonial time, I learned how much can be drawn from something that I never would have given a second thought.