Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is an excellent example of the current enthusiasm for breaking out of the encrusted national boundaries that have confined historical thinking since the beginnings of our profession. It is also an illustration of how a powerful tradition of national specialization may obstruct that endeavor. Enrico Dal Lago, an Italian historian of the United States trained at London University and now teaching in Galway, Ireland, together with Rick Halpern, an American teaching at London University and now the University of Toronto, seem ideal for the task. Their Commonwealth Conference at London University drew dozens of historians from the United States, Italy, and Britain together to examine the “two Souths”: Dixie and the Mezzogiorno (literally “midday” and usually referring to the area south of Rome). Selected papers from that conference, revised, expanded, and at times connected to one another, constitute this book. Peter Kolchin's essay shows how most efforts to identify what is distinctive about the American South usually assume a comparative basis, and he extols the virtues of cross-national comparison as being “exceptionally fruitful” (p. 37). Like so many virtues, international history is more often prescribed than practiced, and the essays in this book demonstrate the difficulty and reluctance historians experience in actually breaching the national boundaries of their special knowledge. Each essay typically opens with a salute to the comparative purpose of the book, then deals exclusively with Italy or the United States. As a result, the book consists mostly of what Kolchin calls “historical juxtaposition,” wherein case studies are set side by side and “any comparison is left to the reader” (p. 47). That said, Dal Lago and Halpern have done a superb job in juxtaposing the essays, and they do not leave it all to the reader (or the authors) to draw out parallels. Many of the pieces could stand alone as brilliant contributions to their field. Fine essays by Richard Follett, Marta Petrusewicz, Steven Hahn, and Lucy Riall examine the role of landed elites and rural workers first in the United States and then in the Italian South. Two essays on gender by J. William Harris and Giovanna Fiume offer another parallel between the regions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.212 | 0.166 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".