When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new social institution: the coffeehouse. For the price of a single penny—the cost of a cup of coffee—any man could enter, sit at a shared table, read the latest news, and join conversations that ranged from philosophy and science to politics, trade, and gossip. In an age when universities were closed to most of the population and literacy was spreading rapidly, these coffeehouses earned a fitting nickname: “penny universities.”
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England's Coffeehouses and the Birth of Public Debate
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