David Nelson featured Usher Lecture Series speaker
Nov. 3—TIFTON — David Nelson will speak on "Microbes and Xenophobes: Scotland's Moral Panic over Italian Ice Cream, 1880-1920" on Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. in the Jess Usher Lecture Series at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.
Nelson is a Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at ABAC-Bainbridge.
Each event in the series is open to the public at no charge with no ticket required. All series events are held in Howard Auditorium on the ABAC Tifton campus.
Formerly known as the ABAC Lecture Series, this special collection of presenters has been renamed in memory of Jess Usher, a former ABAC faculty member and lecturer in the series, who passed away in 2021.
Nelson's message addresses a time in the 1880s when Scottish newspapers began publishing accounts of poisonings by a new food fad, ice cream. Made from milk, cream, and ice in sometimes unsanitary conditions in an age before modern refrigeration and health regulations, the sweet confection could indeed be a dangerous dessert.
Ice cream's reputation was not helped by the Scottish public's perception of its producers and sellers who happened to be newly arrived Italians.
"I discovered this panic over ice cream, of all things, while researching a completely different topic," Nelson said. "As I searched through 19th-century Scottish newspapers, I kept seeing these urgent stories about Italians poisoning and corrupting Scottish youth. And this was a story I had not seen anywhere else in the historical literature, so I was hooked.
"My talk traces this decadeslong debates over Sunday trading, how best to control the sexual and antisocial behavior of Scottish teenagers, and the rise of the temperance movement all became interwoven with xenophobic fears and genuine concerns over ice cream's effect on public safety."
Other speakers in the series include Abdur Rahman Muhammad, sponsored by the Tom M. Cordell Distinguished Lecture Series, on "Journey for Justice in the Malcolm X Assassination Case" on Jan. 24.
Thomas Grant, a professor of journalism at ABAC, and Kaci West, a senior lecturer at ABAC, wind up the series on March 13 with "Literature and the Landscape," a tantalizing look at how they followed the trail of The Knights of the Round Table in England and Wales.
