**HISTORY REPEATS? Dunkin’s Free Coffee Day Echoes 1773 — But With a Caffeine Twist**
HISTORY REPEATS? Dunkin’s Free Coffee Day Echoes 1773 — But With a Caffeine Twist
BOSTON, MA — History buffs are drawing surprising parallels between Dunkin’s nationwide free coffee giveaway on May 19 and a little-known 18th-century social experiment: the “Liberty Brew” of 1773.
While most Americans remember the Boston Tea Party, few know that colonial coffee houses offered free cups of coffee on May 19, 1773 — exactly 250 years before today’s promotion — as a symbolic protest against British tea taxes. “It was a caffeinated act of defiance,” says Dr. Eleanor Brewster, historian at the New England Historical Society. “They weren’t just giving away coffee; they were building a new national identity.”