TIFTON — Dr. David Nelson will speak on “Microbes and Xenophobes: Scotland’s Moral Panic over Italian Ice Cream, 1880-1920.”

It is scheduled for 7 p.m., Nov. 17, as part of the Jess Usher Lecture Series at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, college officials said in a statement.

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, the special collection of presenters has been renamed in memory of Dr. 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, college officials said.

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, college officials said.

“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 decades-long debate 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.”