Milk

3 credits · Undergraduate credit

This course considers the history of milk: its ancient origins, its checkered recent history, and uncertain future. Through our readings and lectures, students learn that dairy has played an outsized -- and sometimes terrifying -- role in shaping the flow of history. It has allowed humans to negotiate marginal environments, help build mighty empires, and served as symbols of the promise and the dangers of Western modernity. In the present, it has become a white supremacist meme.