The Missionary Position: The American Roots of Northrop Frye’s Peaceable Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Key to Canada’s attractiveness internationally is its characterization as a “peaceable kingdom,” a term famously used by Canadian scholar Northrop Frye in 1965 to articulate what makes Canada distinctive. In the conclusion to Literary History of Canada, Frye uses his reading of American folk art to put forth the concept of Canada as on “a quest for the peaceable kingdom,” citing works by two men (Erastus Salisbury Field’s Historical Monument of the American Republic and Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom) whose religious convictions also fundamentally shaped their artistic output to frame his argument. Through a closer examination of these canvases, the article explores how Frye’s idea of the peaceable kingdom is shaped by American religions and their missionary traditions—specifically Quakers and Methodists—and the historical flow of these religions across the Canada-US border, in combination with the influx of Loyalists northward and the subsequent commitment to missions that was part of British, American, and Canadian society. The American roots of Frye’s peaceable kingdom serve as a tangible reminder that borders are porous, and that those origins need to be acknowledged as a critical part of Canada’s self-construction.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".