Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Ed. by Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. xii, 264 pp. Cloth, $42.00, ISBN 978-0-8014-4624-5. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-7559-7.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Students of American history are well aware of the extensive use of bond labor in the sustenance and growth of colonial North America. Both slavery and indentured servitude receive ample coverage in traditional surveys. Yet little attention has been paid to the thousands of children and adolescents whose familial circumstances led to their legal indenture—until eighteen for girls, twenty-one for boys. Whether these young people came to their circumstances through parental death, abandonment, illegitimacy, single parenting, or simply abject poverty, local colonial magistrates undertook to manage these children's lives. During their legal indenture to a family, apprenticeship in an artisanal workshop, or institutional placement, these children worked long hours in return for crude living accommodations and limited education or training. Whether called indenture or binding out and whether administered by local magistrates or an orphanage, this system provided a free laboring engine for colonial and early America. Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray have brought together conference papers that address pauper child apprenticeships from Montreal to New Orleans, including ones in southern New England, the middle colonies, Georgia, and South Carolina. Two introductory essays cover the historiography of poor relief and social welfare in the colonies and analyze the British practices on which they were based. The practice of apprenticing poor children, with or without parental consent, and the shipping of those children to populate Jamestown and other Virginia settlements is detailed in a fine essay by Herndon and Steven Hindle.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".