The bright white milk glass bud vase that stood quietly on your mother’s kitchen shelf since the 1950s is actually an object with a history that dates to the Italian Renaissance era.

The bright white milk glass bud vase that stood quietly on your mother’s kitchen shelf since the 1950s is actually an object with a history that dates to the Italian Renaissance era.

The stylised blue-and-white cartoon bunny became an icon: in 1972 Zhou Enlai, then China’s prime minister, presented White Rabbits to Richard Nixon on his first visit to Communist China.

Say you’re poking around your grandmother’s attic, and you find a milky-white glass candy dish with a duck lid. Or maybe you’re at a garage sale, and you run across an opaque white glass ...

Variations of milk glass have been around for centuries, but these days, it tends to refer to the white glass that was popular in the U.S. and England from 1835 through the 1980s.