The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans. By Carol Wilson. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. xii, 158 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8135-4057-3. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4058-0.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Two Lives of Sally Miller is a straightforward, well-crafted reconstruction of Sally Miller's story. Miller was a slave who sued for freedom in 1844. Her lawsuit had an uncommon, though not unheard-of, premise—that she was actually white. Miller argued that she had been wrongfully enslaved a quarter of century earlier at the age of three. She said her real name was Salomé Muller and that she had immigrated with her family to Louisiana from Germany in 1818. The hardships of the voyage and acclimation to a new environment claimed the lives of all but her sister. John Miller, an ambitious entrepreneur, “redeemed” Salomé, a practice akin to indentured servitude, whereby immigrants were contracted to work for whomever paid their travel debts. Sally Miller accused John Miller of passing her off as an extremely light skinned Negro, eventually selling her to another man. Even though physically she was white in every respect, John Miller's claim was especially plausible in New Orleans where racial identity was exceptionally fluid. Sally Miller's claims were hotly debated both in and out of court, a debate that continued long after the trial's conclusion. Carol Wilson's conclusions regarding Miller's true identity (I will not spoil the ending here) are persuasive.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".