‘Of Great Utility’: The Public Identity of Early American Rangers and Its Impact on American Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In late 1752Governor Peregrine Thomas Hopson dispatched to the Lords of Trade a report in which he assessed the contributions that Anglo-American rangers had made to Nova Scotia's defence. Since the mid-1740s, rangers had clashed with Mi'kmaq and Acadian guerrillas in a brutal petite guerre across the Maritimes.1 But with the costs of maintaining a nascent empire spiralling upward and the hostilities in Nova Scotia seemingly at a lull, the Lords wanted Hopson's opinion on the necessity and feasibility of keeping a company of rangers on the colony's defensive establishment. The Lords believed that disbanding the troops would offer considerable cost savings. Hopson, however, understood the continued value of the rangers to the defence of the colony. Thus, while he failed to offer a precise recommendation on the exact number of rangers needed in Nova Scotia, he nonetheless provided the Lords with a justification for keeping at least a minimal force on hand. 'I am not able to inform your Lordships that I have heard of any particular exploit worth remarking being done by the Rangers', Hopson wrote, 'the nature of their service, being irregular, scarcely admits of it, but they have most
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".