The Pax Romana (Roman Peace) ended in 192 with the reign of Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, sending the empire into the Crisis of the Third Century. I argue that Commodus’s rule, though extravagant, merely exacerbated a larger systemic breakdown, stemming from a civil war in 175, continuous famine and drought, as well as constant war on the east and north frontiers. Additionally, I argue that Marcus Aurelius’s insistence upon maintaining his reputation put the entire empire at risk. He covered up the hedonism of his brother Lucius Verus, who was meant to be waging the war in Parthia, and refused to adopt a more competent son, ignoring Commodus’s faults over familial obligations and prioritizing his own appearance as humble. I am analyzing and comparing primary sources to reconstruct the story as accurately as possible, in order to discover the cause for this breakdown in governance. Hopefully, we can avoid the same mistakes, both in the US and abroad.

Sugarcane monocropping in the Caribbean by colonial agricultural systems shaped environmental soil conditions in the region. These farming practices resulted from a broader colonial culture that allowed for exploitative ideology to thrive, which positioned sugarcane as an economically superior crop over indigenous crops. Exploitative colonial ideology can be further understood by examining traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), including grandiosity, superiority, and exploitation. In this paper, NPD is used to understand why the colonizer feels they are superior to the colonized, while Moral Disengagement Theory (MDT), another psychoanalytical framework, is explored to understand how the colonizer is able to commit heinous acts against Indigenous and enslaved peoples and land. As an exploration of the multifaceted components of colonial ideology and its past and ongoing environmental impacts, this paper draws on historical analyses of colonialism in the Caribbean, macroaggregate soil samples, and medical research journals. This research explores how corrosive colonial ideologies shaped the approach of monocropping to colonize the Caribbean's soilscapes, and highlights the importance of applying psychological frameworks to historical investigations of the environmental legacies of colonial planting systems.

The Union Army’s United States Colored Troops (USCT) embodied patriotism in its purest form. President Lincoln recognized how the entry of 210,000 USCT was decisive in the North’s Civil War victory. Despite minimal federal and public support, USCT soldiers fought to uphold their core values of justice and liberty. Yet, the struggle did not come without sacrifice. Thousands of USCT died, with disease being the primary cause. The prevalence of disease made an effective wartime medical system even more imperative, and many Black medical experts provided crucial care to their regiments. This research examines treatment received and administered by members of the USCT through analysis of existing literature and primary sources. The USCT’s disproportionately strenuous labor assignments, the quality and location of their care, and the treatment they received from White doctors explain why the USCT had higher disease contraction and mortality rates than their White counterparts. Furthermore, by exploring the education and service of Black medical professionals in the USCT, we reveal the ways they overcame social and structural barriers in order to contribute to the Union’s cause. Importantly, our study provides a foundation for further research about the challenges African Americans have faced in healthcare throughout history.

This project examines how modern psychiatric understandings of madness in France emerged within a broader visual culture that sought to make interior emotional states visible and interpretable. During the long eighteenth century, Enlightenment empiricism, theories of temperament, and the culture of sensibility encouraged artists and viewers to treat facial expression and bodily gesture as evidence of inner feeling. Through visual analysis of works by Louis Jean-François Lagrenée, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Théodore Géricault, this project traces a shift in the representation of emotion from allegorical temperament to individualized sentiment and ultimately to medicalized pathology. Lagrenée’s allegories present melancholy as a stable moral disposition, Greuze’s expressive heads intensify the legibility of feeling, and Géricault’s Portraits of the Insane align emotional disturbance with emerging psychiatric classification. Together, these works reveal how artistic practices helped establish the visual and epistemological conditions that made madness observable, interpretable, and diagnosable in modern psychiatry.