Dangerous Liaisons: Narratives of Sexual Danger in the Anglo-American North, 1770–1820
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I seek to understand why Anglo-Americans in the early Republic became preoccupied with stories about sex, especially narratives in which sex was perceived as dangerous. Historians of sexuality have identified the late eighteenth century as an important moment in the transformation of sexual ideologies. Sex became increasingly politicized and connected to ideas about nationhood and citizenship. The regulation of sex was part of a larger transition in which populations were regulated, categorized, and controlled. The Anglo-American North is a dynamic time and place to examine these larger trends - this was the time when white Americans were actively creating a national culture, one that included white people and excluded blacks and aboriginal peoples. I show that, starting in the 1770s, Anglo-Americans increasingly published stories in newspapers, magazines, and novels, in which people were punished for illicit sexual acts. I argue that this increased attention was connected to ideas of Republican virtue. Narratives of sexual danger reflected a belief that immorality would undermine the family, the basic unit of the Republic. Men and women shared in the responsibility of preserving the Republic by controlling their passions.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".