From the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night, Americans are ever mindful of a creature-filled world existing just beyond the capacity of their senses, one populated by a host of potentially infectious microorganisms.

And Americans’ awareness of the imperceptible dangers those germs represent is one of the governing influences on their thoughts and behaviors throughout the waking day.

Yet, a complex, scientific understanding of bacteria as sources of disease, one that accounted for multiple modes of infection, is little more than a century-old idea.

How, then, did Americans see and experience their world before knowledge of germs heightened the importance of such moments as sneezes, coughs, kisses, and handshakes? Where was this importance placed before? When and how did it shift, and what were the consequences? In short, how did Americans mentally parse their sensory experiences before they understood the dangers of imperceptible microbes?

I explore these questions through the historical emergence at the turn of the twentieth century of what I describe as an American “germoscopic perspective” in my dissertation, “The Uncommon Cup: A History of God, the Germ, and Ingenuity in America.”

I do so by weaving a narrative of discovery, innovation, and bitter controversy through three case studies, each of which centers on shifts in how Americans saw and understood the act of communal drinking, whether in a formal, religious context such as the use of shared chalices during the observance of Holy Communion or an informal, secular setting like an urban public water fountain.

The first of these studies analyzes the transformation of the Holy Communion ceremony among Protestants from their fear of disease; the second, technological development and commercial promotion of the paper drinking cup for use in public spaces; and the final, the design of sanitary public drinking fountains and their eventual installation as instruments of racial segregation.

What I find in this history is that Americans’ emerging knowledge of disease-causing germs in the early twentieth century spurred fundamental questions about the effects and uses of science in American religion, the nation’s capitalist economy, and its rapidly diversifying society. Did fear of sharing a communion chalice with a fellow Christian betray a lack of faith on the part of the fearful? What were the broader implications of the rise of a consumer culture of disposability in the United States? And how did the otherwise impersonal quality of the germ to infect become a tool to project race and class bigotry?

This emerging knowledge of the microscopic world, in other words, provoked questions of a cultural magnitude on par with what centuries of growing science of the world at a macroscopic level of planets, stars, and galaxies had provoked, from heliocentrism in the 16th century, to the Big Bang cosmological model in the 20th.

The germoscopic perspective became one of the transformative ideas of modern American life.

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To read about Matt’s presentations of his research, see the following links: