On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs, unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking, how they shape our psychology and culture, and how much of our past we can find in the present.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Well, Billy, you and I must tame animals more dangerous than bucking brunco.

I help you control animals that could make you sick.

Stop admitting West Africans into America right now.

I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way.

Believe me.

I've still got this lasting traumatic movie memory from when I was about eight or so.

It was one of those disaster thrillers so popular in the 90s called Outbreak,

basically a fictionalization of what an Ebola pandemic would look like if the disease mutated and went airborne.

The scene I remember most vividly was set in a movie theater,

and outbreak had sort of animated the germs so you could see them travel through the air,

from the coughing mouth of Patient Zero and into the laughing, gasping mouths of the rest of the audience,

and then cut to the theater bathroom where people are coughing up blood into the row of white porcelain sinks. Of course, panics around germs and the

diseases and viruses they can cause make sense on the most base instinctual level. In a real sense,

germs are kind of our only modern predator, and they're invisible and impossible to detect.

What could be scarier than that?

And we've only been aware of germ's existence for about the last 150 years.

Before that, it was bad smells, demons, and dirt that apparently caused waves of brutal plagues.

Since the major discovery of germ theory in the 1860s, America slowly accepted that pretty

much everything had to change in order for safety to be guaranteed.

And during the boom of American advertising, clean was in, and a slew of new hygiene

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