Panelists and featured guests discuss history topics with Clements staff in this webinar series. In this conversation, author Don James McLaughlin explores how phobia — first tied to diseases like hydrophobia (rabies) — became a flexible suffix attached to various fears and social concerns, shaping political, medical, and aesthetic thought from the colonial period through the early 20th century.

McLaughlin traces the emergence and evolution of phobia as a concept in American culture long before it became established in modern psychology. McLaughlin challenges the idea that phobia only gained prominence with late-19th-century psychiatry, showing instead that the term’s roots extend back to early American literary and medical discourses.