Thesis advisor: Guy Beiner / The Rockite insurgency, purportedly led by the mythic Captain Rock, enacted a campaign of intimidation and violence which terrorized much of southern Ireland from 1821 to 1824. While the Rockite movement was not the first agrarian redresser movement in Ireland, it was unique for the intensity of its violence, as informed by the political ideology of the movement’s participants, the Rockites. This work argues that the Rockite insurgency was political, as manifested in the Rockites’ assertion of an alternative law and their attacks against police as representatives of the state. The intervention into the historiography of agrarian redresser violence is therefore threefold. First, the politics of the Rockites were informed by both the communal morals of rural Irish society and the popular politicization of the 1790s. Second, the violence enacted in the course of the Rockite movement was not due to lawlessness, but rather an allegiance to the ‘law of Captain Rock’ instead. Lastly, the conflict between the Rockites and the state can be exemplified in their clashes with the police, not only as hostile individuals but also as representatives of the state apparatus. Focusing on County Limerick in the year 1821, this work relies on the little-used State of the Country Papers in the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers collection. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Heather Richardson / Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / Between 1824 and 1876, almost ten million immigrants came to the United States. The onset of mass immigration posed a logistical problem: how to process, aid, and regulate a large influx of newcomers. State and federal governments, caught up in conflicts over state sovereignty and slavery, proved ill-equipped to manage the influx of migrants. The states enacted their own individual policies to control mobility, but there was no national immigration policy before the Civil War. Where state and federal governments failed to come up with a comprehensive solution, an ad hoc group of shipping merchants, passenger agents, aid organizations, runners and swindlers responded to the onset of mass migration by turning migration into a commercial enterprise. Taken together, these various actors, which I term the “migration business,” formulated an institutional response to the problem of mass immigration in the US. The passenger trade was a side business for many merchants in 1824, when the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had power over interstate commerce. But by 1876, the migration business had become a vast commercial enterprise, according to the Supreme Court, that was so important to the national interest as to require federal regulation. This dissertation explains how the migration business became a commercial enterprise worthy of federal regulation and how it influenced immigration policy on the local, state, and federal level. Through its control of transportation costs, charitable aid, and state and federal immigrant organizations, the migration business held regulatory power over immigrants, as well. By regulating immigration, the migration business formed its own kind of immigration policy—one that was led by merchants and entrepreneurs, and one that exploited foreign-born people in the US. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Paul Christensen / Contemporary public perceptions of nationalism see the concept as a toxic ideology of isolationist politicians. In contrast, through an analysis of work produced by public servants whose identities are tied more closely with those of artists than politicians, this thesis shifts focus to nationalist sentiments built around inclusivity. Using poems of Ilia Chavchavadze and Thomas Davis, this text serves as a comparative overview of nation-building strategies within Georgia and Ireland. The importance of land, myths, heroic characters, motherly figures, and calls to self-sacrifice are present in poems of both nations, uniting them in the struggle against colonial oppression and offering a common formula for creating a national identity. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2019-05. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: International Studies.

Railroads entered American life during the second quarter of the nineteenth century through the efforts of rural residents who embraced this new technology. In an era of expanding economic opportunities, men and women throughout Massachusetts related what they learned about railroads to their previous experience with mechanization and transportation improvements and took the lead in developing rail projects. By 1850, more than 1,000 miles of track crisscrossed the state, carrying millions of riders annually. Popular support was not only essential to the railroads’ success; rural habits determined the railroads’ final form. In the past, business and economic historians have made railroads the basis of organizational and network studies and measured their support by the allocation of public funds. They have overlooked rural capitalism and early rail technology. This project eschews economic and scientific determinism in favor of a humanistic approach influenced by Jan de Vries’s theory of the “Industrious Revolution” and Joyce Appleby’s definition of capitalism as a cultural system that challenges traditional norms. It identifies several models of railroad development in Massachusetts that break down the traditional binary between “rural” and “urban.” It also refines the investment model of Arthur M. Johnson and Barry E. Supple, which distinguishes “opportunistic” from “developmental” projects. This study recovers the lived experience of rural residents at the intersection of technology and culture. Among its sources, it uses the U.S. Census of Manufactures to show widespread industrialization and a long history of remaking the landscape in the countryside. Rather than trace the flow of investment capital, it examines corporate charters and petitions to measure rural residents’ support for rail technology and their engagement with the political process. It examines knowledge and technology transfer to demonstrate that rural residents were as equipped as urban investors to evaluate new technology and gauge its potential applications. Because Massachusetts was a national leader in industry, politics, the law, reform, the arts, and culture in this period, this more accurate understanding of how railroads emerged helps to reshape our understanding of key topics in the early republic. / 2027-11-30T00:00:00Z

<p> The historiography surrounding the Irish in Canada has generally adopted an American framework that has equated Irishness with Catholicism, thereby creating a very one dimensional picture of what it meant to be Irish in nineteenth century 'Amerikey'. Although historians have shown that the greatest emigrant outpouring for this period was not only an Irish one, but also a Protestant one, relatively little has been done to understand that group on its own terms. Where solid work does exist on Irish Protestant groups in Canada, rarely does one hear them speak in their own words. Rather, where and how quickly they settled, the singular importance of kin networks and the peculiarity of certain institutions is detailed. Little has been done with respect to understanding Irish Protestant identity: how they viewed their new world upon arrival and more importantly, how they would now and later view themselves. Indeed, the question 'Whatever Happened to the Irish?' was answered: Irish Protestants despite the strength of their numbers and their institutions, simply acculturated willingly and quickly into a larger, more encompassing 'British' identity. The assumption has followed that Irish Protestants were never very Irish in the first place. On the contrary, this thesis argues that far from simply fading away, a recognizably Irish Protestant culture - one that identified itself as the Irish nation - overcame early nineteenth century prejudice against 'things Irish' and eventually came to predominate many a local landscape in Ontario. Relying heavily on emigrant letters, this thesis emphasizes an Irish Protestant discourse that enjoyed a distinction and longevity that has yet to be recognized. It also maintains that Irish Catholicism was an integral component to the expression of that identity. Irish Protestants in Ontario remained distinctively Irish for a period longer than their countrymen in Ontario and their co-religionists in the homeland. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This research about women’s caregiving experiences in Jamaica uses the conceptual frameworks of intersectionality and anti-racist feminist perspectives to interpret and analyze the experiences of informal and formally trained nurses and folk healers in post-slavery Jamaica. This study explores how race, colour, class, gender, citizenship, and national identity intersected to define and shape women’s experiences as caregivers in Jamaica between the 1850s and the 1910s. By integrating scholarly interpretations about a plural health system with case studies about the management of diseases and developments in nursing, this research presents an inclusive analysis of female caregivers (British, Euro-American, and Afro-Jamaican nurses and folk healers) in post-slavery Jamaica. The late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries was the period of the “new” imperialism characterized by the growth of caregiving and medical philanthropy in aiding the expansion of imperial pursuits and the civilizing mission of empires (British and US). Caregiving reveals how gender, race, class, and national identity intersected to shape the management of diseases in post-slavery Jamaica. On the one hand, formal caregiving was a tool for empire-building through colonial medical policies that aimed to heal the bodies and “civilize” the mentality of colonized peoples. On the other hand, informal caregiving empowered oppressed people to reshape cultural customs by adapting healing and religious practices to challenge British imperialism and claim citizenship. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This study examines the management of epidemics and disease in post-slavery Jamaica by highlighting the contributions of female caregivers, such as informally and formally trained nurses and Afro-Jamaican folk healers. It argues that caregiving provided by the government medical system and Afro-Jamaican folk healing developed from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century in response to the challenges of adjusting to emancipation, frequent epidemics and encounters with disease. However, the government’s efforts to contain epidemics and disease were inadequate because of a shortage of medical practitioners, insufficient medical infrastructure, and white medical elites’ racial and class prejudices toward the labouring class. Nursing developed in parallel with establishing public hospitals and medical institutions in the urban centre as sites to control the labouring-class to mitigate epidemics and disease in post-slavery Jamaica. British, Euro-American, and Afro-Jamaican female caregivers deployed religious and medical services (caregiving) that reinforced and challenged racial, class and gender hierarchies during the post-slavery period in Jamaica.

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