MIAC Sunday Lecture Series SPECIAL Thanksgiving week lecture

"Chocolate Heaven and Tobacco Saints: Indian Adaptations to Colonialism in Mesoamerica."

Presented by Marcy Norton, Professor of History, George Washington University

Followed by a book signing of "Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World", and by a drinking chocolate tasting by Kakawa Chocolate House of Santa Fe

Ask anyone what Europe is famous for, and many will say the continent’s smoke-filled cafés and delectable chocolate. Difficult as it is to fathom, prior to Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, no one outside of the Americas had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate. Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an exotic Indian drink, these two ingestibles would eventually permeate European culture and culinary life on a scale unsurpassed by any other New World import. In SACRED GIFTS, PROFANE PLEASURES: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World historian Marcy Norton, Ph.D., traces chocolate and tobacco’s pre-Columbian origins and reveals how these two goods became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike.

Marcy Norton, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at George Washington University. An expert on the history of chocolate and tobacco, Dr. Norton has lectured extensively on these subjects. She is the Associate Editor of Tobacco in History and Culture: An Encyclopedia. . She grew up in Montreal and the Bay Area, received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley, and now resides in Washington, DC.