Shirley Elizabeth Thompson . Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans . Cambridge : Harvard University Press . 2009 . Pp. 362. $49.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shirley Elizabeth Thompson's precision of insight, depth of archival research, and accessible narrative make her book a superior undertaking and a wonderful read. Thompson's narrative explores how pre-1803 Spanish/French New Orleans viewed the concept of “race” so differently from Ango-American definitions of the same elsewhere that New Orleans was essentially a foreign territory. This distinguished it from other “empty” regions elsewhere in the Louisiana Purchase and other lands newly acquired by the new nation. While farther north, groups such as the Métis could be easily removed, ignored, or erased, in New Orleans generations of interracialism, forgotten genealogical trackings, and entrenched entanglements with multiracial communities throughout the Caribbean (especially Saint Domingue/Haiti and Cuba) made the assignment of specific racial identity—increasingly necessary in the decades leading up to the Civil War—nearly impossible. Thompson maps out these conditions through the experiences of individual families. Her archival ambit ranges from diaries and letters to court transcripts, property records, published narratives, Creole-of-color poetry (“Les Cenelles”: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century [1979]), and white fiction, such as George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1898).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".