“These Fishers of Men”: The Discourse of Recruitment in the Civil War North
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the American Civil War, the military forces of the United States required an inordinate number of volunteers to fill the ranks. Historians to date have emphasized the self-motivation of the men who enlisted for duty in the Union armed forces, and as a result, have overlooked how recruiters utilized communications media to entice their service. This thesis examines the use of propaganda to promote enlistment in the Union military during the American Civil War. Throughout the conflict, political figures, military leaders, printers and publishers, prominent citizens, members of voluntary societies dedicated to recruiting, and other self-declared patriots produced thousands of documents and oratories imploring men to join the armed forces. In doing so, these individuals engaged in intentional acts of propaganda. The styles and forms taken by their efforts, however, more clearly reflect the communications culture of the antebellum era than the iconic propaganda campaigns of twentieth-century conflicts. The multiplicity of arguments recruiters made in favour of volunteering indicates that to them, their intended outcome—filling the ranks—was more important than the reasons they provided for doing so.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".