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In this virtual program, Dr. Steve Nash, Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University, talks about many of the dynamics that emerged in Western North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era, with newly freed people gaining the right to vote, and emergence of tobacco as a cash crop to bolster local economies.

Concerns regarding political ‘enslavement’ and imperial constraints on free speech are especially palpable in the literature that follows the emperor Domitian’s assassination in 96 C.E. Under his successors, Nerva and Trajan, authors worked to differentiate the post-Domitianic age from the prior era of metaphorical enslavement and suppressed speech. Scholars have studied some of the ways in which Neronian and Flavian authors employed literary accounts of the Saturnalia, a festival characterized by temporary license and the notional transformation of social roles, to criticize individual rulers and thematize issues of imperial control. Yet they have not fully appreciated the pervasive use of literary Saturnalia in Flavian and post-Flavian political discourse. I examine the Saturnalia as a political metaphor in five texts: Martial’s Domitianic Epigrams 5 and Nervan Epigrams 11, Pliny’s Trajanic Epistles and Panegyricus, and Dio Chrysostom’s Trajanic fourth Oration. In Epigrams 5, Martial thematizes the circumscription of Saturnalian freedom to highlight limits to his poetic expression under Domitian. Later, in his Epigrams 11, Martial’s presentation of the Nervan regime as an age of ‘Saturnalia,’ a festival whose freedoms are inherently temporary, signifies anxiety about whether post-Domitianic freedom from imperial ‘enslavement’ will be short-lived. In the Panegyricus, Pliny praises Trajan for reasserting the social hierarchies that had become troublingly eroded under the dystopic ‘Saturnalia’ of Domitian. Through Pliny’s depiction of domestic Saturnalian celebrations in Epistles 2.17, the senator proves that the perverse ‘Saturnalia’ that plagued imperial life before Trajan are no more. Finally, in Orations 4, Dio Chrysostom uses circumscribed Saturnalian freedom not only as a metaphor for the limited political authority available to Greeks, but also to valorize his own Greek wisdom as essential to Trajan’s correction of shameful ‘Saturnalian’ rule. The authors in this study, although writing from different personal and generic perspectives, depict metaphorical Saturnalia to articulate the distressing limits of freedom under imperial rule or—in the case of Pliny and Dio—to burnish the image of the anti-Saturnalian ruler Trajan. My dissertation demonstrates that literary representations of the Saturnalia occupy a far more important role in imperial Greek and Roman understandings of autocracy than has been previously appreciated.

Human trafficking is a growing illegal crime, both in terms of numbers and profits. Thus, important to consider, as it is a human rights, political, criminal justice, national security, and economic issue. Previous studies have these examined these human trafficking factors independently, yet none have really taken into account how they work simultaneously. This study examines why human trafficker continues to occur, particularly at the domestic and transnational level, and also why some countries are better able to effectively deal with this problem in terms of criminalizing human traffickers. It is argued that at the domestic level, traffickers first must take into account the operating costs, illegal risks, bribery, and profits of the business. After considering these basic elements, they then need to consider the world, including economic, political, geographic, and cultural factors that may help facilitate human trafficking. However, human trafficking can occur across large geographic distances, though rare. This is more likely to happen based on the type of human trafficking group, available expatriate or immigrant networks, the origin-transit-destination country connection, or strength of the bilateral economic relationship between origin and destination countries. Finally, looking at why some countries are better able to criminalize traffickers helps us to better understand how human trafficking can be discouraged. In short, conformity of a country’s domestic anti-human trafficking law, as well as the degree of enforcement, should increase the probability of criminalizing a human trafficker. These three theoretical arguments help to better understand the nature of the business, and more importantly, why human trafficking continues.

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Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / This dissertation is a history of the First Irish Diaspora and its relationship to the Spanish Empire’s eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. Although there is a long history of Irish migration to Spain, I argue that the conjuncture of the War of the English Succession (1688-1695) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) foreclosed hopes of a reversal of the seventeenth century Irish land-confiscations which defined the English conquest and colonization of Ireland, pushing thousands of Irish Catholics into exile near-simultaneous to the ascension of a reform-minded Bourbon monarchy to the Spanish thrown which opened new opportunities for useful subjects. At the same time, these wars established the emergent British Empire as a rising Atlantic hegemon and exposed the fragility of a Spanish Empire widely viewed by contemporaries as in decline. In such a context, Irish familiarity with British methods of empire-making made them ideal imperial translators for the Spanish Crown precisely as the empire embarked on its Bourbon Reform program. Genealogy and religion formed the foundations of Irish assimilation into the Spanish Empire – the Irish became Hiberno-Spaniards because of the “genealogical fiction” that the Irish sliocht (“race,” literally “seed”) descended from Spaniards and because they were Catholic. In Spain, the impact of this Hiberno-Spanish diaspora on the Bourbon Reforms began following the War of the Spanish Succession and reached its crescendo in the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Specifically, Hiberno-Spanish imperialists in the metropole were important participants in the debates and decisions that promoted liberalizing national-colonial trade, investments in infrastructure, the emulation of foreign practices such as British and Irish economic societies, and more; i.e. the emulation of British political economy. Their principal contribution to the empire was the translation of political economic statecraft and a cosmopolitanism of exile that honed their ability to translate foreign ideas in an age of imperial emulation and made them especially effective imperial intermediaries in polyglot and liminal spaces such as the Gulf Coast borderlands. There, in Cuba, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, Hiberno-Spanish slavers, governors, merchants, and imperialists were important contributors to Spain’s real but ephemeral resurgence in colonial North America and the Atlantic world. The Spanish Empire collapsed and Irish emigration patterns rerouted to North America, but Hiberno-Spaniards and the Bourbon Reforms first accelerated the processes of colonization and slavery that transformed Cuba and the Gulf Coast into the world’s capital of cotton, sugar, and slavery in the nineteenth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.