Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History. By Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With newly digitized Government Land Office (GLO) records, geospatial methods, and a rigorous re-examination of long-compiled statistical data, the authors of this impressive collaborative work seek first to dispute the largely negative conclusions set out in a long-unchallenged body of mid-twentieth century scholarship concerning U.S. land policy and pioneer settlement of the American West under the 1862 Homestead Act. Examining seventeen western states in the period from 1860 to 1900, the authors are largely successful in demonstrating that twentieth-century historians, such as Benjamin Hibbard, Fred Shannon, and Gilbert Fite, commonly misinterpreted GLO records and relied too much on anecdotal evidence to obscure the fact that homesteading was the most significant way that western settlers started their farms; most homesteaders “proved up” their 160-acre claims within the designated five-year period; and the incidence of fraudulent claims, whether involving settlers, railroad officials, or well-capitalized land speculators, was likely no more than 9 percent. Assessment of digitized records of a study area comprising ten townships situated in Custer and Dawes counties, Nebraska, which includes 621 successful homesteads, indeed demonstrates that instances of stolen soldier identity, marriage fraud, and other illegalities were far less common than the mid-twentieth-century scholarship suggests. Except for the Dakota and Indian territories, homesteaders commonly arrived to stake their claims years after treaties, “title clearance,” and federal reservation reduction programs had put the “surplus” land once possessed by tribes such as the Crow, Blackfeet, and Sioux into the public domain.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".