Drinking coffee, ranging from your daily cup of Starbucks, Dunkin, or Folgers to more refined specialty coffee, is part of our daily routines. This course traces coffee’s evolution from the origins of coffee consumption in sixteenth-century Ethiopia to the twenty-first-century fascination with specialty coffee. The course is divided into four sections. The first section examines coffee's rising popularity in Middle Eastern and European cultures between 1500-1750. Students will learn about different early modern brew methods, Europeans’ initial mistrust of coffee as an “evil” Oriental beverage, the rise of coffee consumption, and the advent of coffeehouses in the Middle East and Europe. The second section covers 1750 to 1950 through an examination of coffee’s role in Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century political revolutions, coffee’s relationship with chattel slavery, and its expansion into American and Asian markets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third section of the course looks at how El Salvador became known as “Coffeeland” to explore how coffee was shaped by the Industrial Revolution, American and European imperialism, and global capitalism. The final section of the course focuses on the Postwar Era with the rise of mass-market coffee and the recent advent of “third-wave” specialty coffee since the turn of the millennium. Students can decide between writing a traditional research paper, recording a podcast episode, or recording an oral presentation for their final research project for the class.