Sunday Puzzle

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On-air challenge

I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.

Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY

1. Habit Tempt

2. Laten Press

3. Blank Ching

4. Since Venue

5. Shack Groom

6. Surge Stage

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?

Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal

Winner

Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.

This week’s challenge

Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.

Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.

As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.

To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.

In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.

But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.

Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:

It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.