Dale Barbour. Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dale Barbour. Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011. 212 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $24.95 sc. Winnipeg Beach served as Manitoba's Coney Island and, arguably, the principle resort on the prairies. This book highlights its halcyon days. In the early years of the twentieth century, when Winnipeg was the country's third-largest city and some of its residents thought it had the potential to become a world-class city, Winnipeg Beach was to be its world-class resort. In its 1920s heyday, a train running on the CPR's purportedly most profitable stretch of line, permitted the Beach on busy weekends to host a reported 35,000 to 40,000 at a time when the province had less than a half-million residents. This book's genesis is in a master's thesis and the author is a Ph.D. student in history. A most attractive feature is the inclusion of some 50 archival photographs. They convey a flavour of the times, dress, and activities. There are also a couple of maps and an advertisement. It refers to the boardwalk, has images of young couples dancing, a band playing, and the beach train, which featured a 70-minute return home on the Midnight Special. The focus is on the changing rituals of courtship that, in the twentieth century's early decades, shifted from the home or other controlled social settings to dating. The author relies heavily on oral accounts by seniors recalling their youth. It was, as one of them notes, a time when Virginity was pretty highly thought of ... (45). Nevertheless, some unmarried couples rented rooms. The Beach also witnessed some gay cruising, evidenced by drag apparel, and it had a small gay clientele and a fair bit of homosocial bunking. In contrast, the sexes mixed in the leisure zone whose heterosexual space was not to be transgressed and where locals deemed it inappropriate that a woman date a man shorter than her. By the 1930s, men appeared without tops and women displayed more skin at the Beach. By the 1960's, with the Beach in decline, a government minister feared it would sink into a slum area. The chapters deal with transportation to the Beach, its tourist infrastructure and leisure offerings, and efforts to rebrand the Beach as a family resort after its decline as a locale for dating, the erosion of its shoreline, and the rise of venues such as Disneyland, which became accessible alternatives for the middle classes. There are some comparisons made and contrasts drawn with other seaside parks and resorts such as Toronto's Hanlan's Point, England's Blackpool, and New Jersey's Atlantic City, but these references are peripheral to the narrative. …
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".