Phobia: The Therapeutic Imagination in American Liberalism provides an intellectual history to explain how phobia first came to prominence as a medical diagnosis, political analytic, and aesthetic sensibility in American print cultures. In current political discourse, Americans rely on phobia as a concept to describe conditions of social injustice. Policies that negatively impact communities based on sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, or religion are understood to operate from homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic biases. These terms aspire to a familiar hypothesis: that systemic inequality originates in a nucleus of subconscious fear, on the part of those wielding the greatest political and economic power. My book in progress demonstrates how in the early 1800s a phobic imagination emerged by way of an experimental comparison integrating understandings of infectious disease and psychopathology: rabies and racism. The common name for rabies at the time was hydrophobia, named for the dread of swallowing water known to accompany the disease. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, abolitionist newspapers began to publish satirical editorials describing an analogous condition they called “colorphobia.” Eventually, what began as a pun began to be taken seriously, opening a discourse of public health activism that took fear as its primary target. In these competing uses, phobia comprised a complex discursive resource. In an expansive study of medical, literary, and political writing from the late colonial era to the Harlem Renaissance, I examine how phobia evolved into a framework for exploring myriad themes, including the relationship between individual psychology and social injustice, the benefits and limits of empathy as a mode of political engagement, and various functions of fear as an affective force in civil society.