In Search of the Lace Curtain: Residential Mobility, Class Transformation, and Everyday Practice among Buffalo’s Irish, 1880—1910
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses social and spatial aspects of intraethnic identity transitions within an American city between 1880 and 1910. Set within a theoretical framework that views urban spaces as social and cultural creations that in turn affect the construction of identities, it focuses on Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo, New York. Evidence is initially presented on their intergenerational residential movements within the city at a time of widening social distinctions and occupational mobility. This is then supplemented by material from more qualitative sources, chiefly a diocesan newspaper and an “urban-ethnic novel.” While Irish American popular culture drew broad lines between working-class “shanty” lifestyles and those of a more respectable “lace-curtain” middle class during this era, the Buffalo evidence demonstrates these categories to be overdrawn and of almost caricature quality. In bringing the upwardly mobile portion of the group into focus, however, the article considers not simply the occupational characteristics of moving households and their destinations but also the sources and effects of place-based imaginations within the city and the relatively neglected roles of homes as sites of socialization and identity negotiation within Catholic parishes. Pursuing these latter lines of inquiry also enriches understandings of the place of women in the process of Irish American social mobility.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it