Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Epic Journeys of Freedom relates previously untold narratives of African Americans who struggled for their own independence during the American Revolution. In contrast to Benjamin Quarles, who also studied slaves who ran away to the British in his still-relevant book, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Cassandra Pybus focuses her attention on individual narratives. She recovers “from scattered fragments in the archives the stories of individuals engaged in the tortuous process of negotiating their freedom during the American Revolution” (p. xxvii). Readers will be impressed by how tortuous the journeys of some of those runaways truly were. While most of the runaways eventually ended up in England or Nova Scotia, the remainder found homes in locales scattered around the globe. Take Harry Washington, for instance. Washington fed from George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation in 1776 to join John Murray, Lord Dunmore, and was evacuated by the British army to New York City. In 1780, as a corporal in a company of Black Pioneers, Washington participated in the siege of Charleston, South Carolina. At the end of the war the British army evacuated him to Nova Scotia on the ship L'Abondance, in spite of American efforts to prevent runaways from escaping with the British. After living for a while in Nova Scotia, where he married and started a family on two town lots and forty acres, Washington, accompanied by his family, migrated to Sierra Leone in 1792 to escape racial discrimination. In 1800 Washington left his farm near Freetown, Sierra Leone, to join other settlers in taking up arms in a struggle for independence from the Sierra Leone Company. When their bid for autonomy failed, Washington was sent into exile.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.026 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".