Journeys of an Immigrant Violinist: Jacques Oliveira in Civil War–Era New York and New Orleans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the U.S. career of the Dutch immigrant violinist Jacques Oliveira. Following successful performances in Britain, Oliveira sailed for the United States in the fall of 1859. Under P.T. Barnum's management, the twenty-three-year-old became a fixture on New York's theatrical scene, as an instrumental soloist with Tom Thumb's company, with the Drayton Parlor Opera troupe, and with Hooley and Campbell's Minstrels. After a year, he traveled south, settling in occupied New Orleans, where he had family connections. Despite the economic difficulties of the time, he soon became an important figure in the city's cultural life, only to die during an outbreak of cholera and yellow fever in the summer of 1867. In the absence of letters or diaries, the article relies heavily on close examination of period newspapers, city directories and census data to reconstruct Oliveira's world. Oliveira's activities, his successes and struggles, offer insights into the place of the working musician, newly arrived in the Unites States in the late 1850s. Examining the events of his life enables us to contrast cultural life in New York and New Orleans at the time of the Civil War. The article illuminates the place of the instrumentalist in the theater, reveals how attitudes toward music were influenced by a cultural hierarchy, provides insights into the place of the violin in the musical life of the United States, and examines the impact of the Civil War on musical life in New Orleans.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".