to Render the Private Public: William Still and the Selling of the Underground Rail Road
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN HIS BOOK BLACK Man (1863), William Wells Brown, well known abolitionist and author of the controversial Clotel; or, the President's Daughter, described William Still's interest in the plight of slaves: The long connection of Mr. Still with the antislavery office, in a city through which fugitive slaves had to pass in their flight from bondage, and the deep interest felt by him for the freedom and welfare of his race have brought him prominently before the Brown's assess ment of Still places his life and work in the public sphere. Although William Still (1821-1902) was a well-known antislavery agitator, the nature of his work as head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee required him to be more circumspect in his actions than Brown implies. While Still performed Herculean labors on behalf of the fugitive slave population in the antebellum period, he chose to keep a low public profile. He lectured on the evils of slavery in the United States and Canada but was not a part of the influential transatlantic abolitionist community. Still was a visible member of Philadelphia's free black community, and this is where he exerted his greatest influence and earned his reputation as a prominent antislavery man. It was not until the postbellum period, how ever, that Still, through the publication of his book Underground Rail Road, would be positioned to make the fruits of his private labors public. By doing so Still provided one of the most substantial records of how African Americans, through independent action and interracial alliance, undermined the institution of slavery.1 publication of Underground Rail Road in 1872 heightened
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.005 |
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".