How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America. By Carl Abbott. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. x, 347 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-3312-4.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ably conceived and especially readable study narrates over four centuries of the urban history of western North America—the area from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River and the Mexican border. Carl Abbott, a distinguished urban historian, in fifteen sometimes very brief chapters incorporates extensive urban scholarship on early cities as seats of empire; urban rivalry as a central theme of early city history; garden, mining and tourist cities; water and the city based on irrigation; distinctive western city building and housing patterns (the emergence of the bungalow and the creative architecture of Los Angeles, for example); and immigration, ethnicity, and race. In his later chapters he argues that since the 1940s western cities have ceased to be reflective of general change and have been transformed into primary instruments in a process of global transformation. The author, to cite only one example of original scholarship, makes a significant contribution to the standard conception of western cities as spearheads of the frontier with his discussion of the founding of north-south gateway cities extending from Winnipeg to San Antonio. The scholarship discussed in the extensive chapter bibliographies and detailed notes make this brief book a valuable reference tool as well as an unusually readable general account.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".