Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee and Borderland Cultures, 1815-1840. By James Z. Schwartz. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. viii, 184 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-87580-400-2.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
James Z. Schwartz's Conflict on the Michigan Frontier examines how Michigan's society was shaped by settlers from the East responding to the frontier and its borderland cultures. Newcomers to Michigan found the frontier's blended culture distasteful and sought to restrain and re-create a familiar eastern society. To this end, Schwartz argues, the newcomers erected legal and social boundaries to create their civilized society. While they alleviated some of the frontier's perceived lawlessness and savagery, the newcomers failed; instead, a new culture emerged that was a hybrid blend of the “civilized” East and the frontier. Schwartz relies heavily on newspapers to illustrate the shock and displeasure as well as the efforts to reform the savage and lawless nature of frontier society. The examples and arguments based on those newspaper articles draw the reader into the period while ably reinforcing the author's main point concerning Yankee perceptions of borderland culture. The taming of the Indians and the civilizing of the earlier white settlers (French and English/American traders) are the fulcrum of the monograph. Laws were passed to limit settler contact with Indians and to remove Native Americans from Michigan in an effort to limit their negative influence on settlers. Newspapers reinforced racial boundaries by printing and reprinting actual and fictional captivity narratives that emphasized the incompatibility of Indian and Anglo cultures. To civilize settlers, laws were created to purge society of vice—gambling, drinking, prostitution—while papers printed stories aimed at creating a virtuous readership through lessons on morality, family, and gender roles. The campaigns to civilize settlers while curbing drunkenness and creating a new ideal of fatherhood led to an increase in the number of educated women who refused to conform to traditional roles. In the end, Schwartz shows that legal and societal efforts were only partially effective and occasionally operated at cross purposes—Indians remained in Michigan, whites continued to socialize with them, and gambling, drinking, and prostitution continued apace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".