Bibliographic record
Abstract
In April 1857, Maryland authorities arrested Samuel Green, a free African-American minister, charging him with two crimes: first, possessing a map of Canada, a railroad schedule to Canada, and letters Green’s son had written from Canada; second, “knowingly having in his possession a certain abolition pamphlet called ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ or ‘life among the lowly.’” These items, according to the indictment, were “of an inflammatory character calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population of this State.” Although the court concluded that the letter, map, and railroad schedule were not conclusive proof of Green’s intention to help slaves escape, it ruled that Green’s possession of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was clearly a crime. In May, Green was sentenced to ten years in the Maryland State Penitentiary for having a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811–96) novel. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was never merely phenomenally popular; it was fundamentally dangerous. The novel remains dangerous. If at one time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was thought to be the single most powerful instrument for destroying slavery – an understanding illustrated by Abraham Lincoln’s notorious yet apocryphal comment upon meeting Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war” – more recently, readers have regarded the novel as an insidious mechanism for solidifying demeaning stereotypes about African Americans (a position crystallized by the way that the incendiary epithet Uncle Tom has become shorthand for the cowardly obsequiousness of a race traitor). As one critic has rather dramatically declared, “The devil himself could have forged no shrewder weapon” to oppress African Americans than Uncle Tom’s Cabin .
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 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".