Fasts, Thanksgivings, and Senses of Community in Nineteenth-Century Canada and the British Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On at least eighty-seven occasions between 1789 and 1901, Canadian state authorities set aside days so that their populations could thank God for blessings or implore divine intervention and assistance in periods of crisis. By Confederation, every Canadian colony and province had developed a tradition of marking exceptional occasions with days of fasting and thanksgiving. After 1867, the provincial governments, and then the dominion government, regularly called thanksgiving days for good harvests. Improvements in communication following the 1880s made the first genuinely empire-wide days of prayer possible. This article considers why days of fasting, humiliation, and thanksgiving were such an enduring aspect of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian life. Special acts of worship changed their character and purpose over the course of the century, but they survived because Protestant churchmen and civil officials continued to value their community-building potential. The doctrine of “national providentialism” – the idea that nations and peoples were rewarded or punished as a collective for their piety and sinfulness – nourished a range of community identifications in pre- and post-Confederation Canada. On the one hand, the article explores the varied senses of community that were stimulated by imperial, dominion, provincial, and regional holy days; on the other hand, it shows how these occasions could expose fault lines in Canadian society.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 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".