I took a Renaissance class recently, and I was told that coffee shops in the past were looked upon with suspicion, as they apparently were areas ripe for insurrection and other naughty things. Have you heard anything about this? Thanks!

Absolutely. Coffee houses were a hotbed of social and political change from the 17th century through the 19th century, because they were places where people read and talked about newspapers, handbills, pamphlets, banned books, gossip, stock market prices and bank failures, and other subversive things, all while hopped up on caffeine. A good place to spread insurrectionary ideas, or spark a bank run, or a brawl or a riot.  

However, because they were associated with finance, they were also places where you got a lot of white collar crime: lots of fraud and confidence schemes, especially because there’s no regulation of the financial sector or the stock market, lots of counterfeiting and forgery, lots of insider trading and watering of stocks (here, go watch this about the South Sea bubble), etc. And wherever you’ve got lots of people with liquid capital in one place, you’re going to get pickpocketing and mugging and fencing of stolen goods, you’re going to get prostitution and blackmail (see the second act of Hamilton).

No wonder people needed to drink all that coffee, sounds exhausting.