Gilles Havard. Histoire des coureurs de bois: Amérique du Nord, 1600–1840.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Let us say it simply: Histoire des coureurs de bois is a masterwork. But as every one of the thirty-five chapters (760 pages of text) in this award-winning book could be reviewed, I can only give here some limited arguments and say first that this is not a definitive history of the fur trade. Gilles Havard argues that his predecessors have mainly studied the trade from an economic perspective; consequently he decided to depict a political, social, and cultural history. Nevertheless, the history of the economy of the fur trade could also be renewed, through new conceptual tools and underused sources. Havard tried to write a continental history, without the colonial and national boundaries that have so frequently segmented North American history and with attention to the different models that appeared in the continent: the Carolina Indian trade was not the Illinois or Canadian trade. The author admits that he does not study the Hispanic Southwest, first by arguing that there was no fur trade there for decades, and then by mostly ignoring it when this trade finally appeared. Havard ignores Spanish or Mexican archives, as well as Dutch ones (but who can perfectly master archives in four languages and two continents?) and some useful repositories in the U.S., and focuses for the period before 1763 on French material, often previously unpublished, and for the period after 1763 mainly on published sources. There are still fur trade archives to dig up, but that will change neither Havard’s interpretation nor one of his main arguments: we can know the fur trade well from its early beginnings, but it is very difficult to know more about fur traders themselves before 1770.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".