David L. Preston.<i>Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Battle of the Monongahela—in which a detachment of French marines, Canadian militia, and Native American allies defeated British and Anglo-American forces led by General Edward Braddock—has long been recognized as a critical early engagement of the Seven Years’ War in North America, and Braddock himself has often been blamed for its outcome. In a book of uncommon range and depth, David L. Preston has now provided the best account of the events surrounding the battle. He demonstrates that historians have often misrepresented Braddock, effectively details and contextualizes the battle, and makes a compelling case for its far-reaching significance. Preston notes that it has been tempting for historians to reduce the battle to a simple formula: “Braddock’s arrogance or blunders were chiefly responsible for his defeat” (7). He offers a balanced view of Braddock’s character and largely exonerates his actions. The most common charge against Braddock has been the claim, attributed to the Delaware leader Shingas, that the general dismissed Britain’s Indian allies and bluntly told them that “No Savage Shou[ld] Inherit the Land” (114). Preston effectively casts doubt on this claim. He shows that Braddock generously supported the efforts of William Johnson, his newly appointed Indian commissioner; received Indian emissaries “very kindly” (116); and regarded effective Indian diplomacy as an important key to success. Responsibility for failed Indian relations lay, Preston argues, not with Braddock but with the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, each of which had taken actions that alienated Indian allies. When Chickasaws and Cherokees killed six Mohawk emissaries in early 1755, it became even less likely that an interethnic coalition of warriors would join Braddock’s campaign. The general, Preston demonstrates, was not the architect of these failures but their unhappy victim.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
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".