From Furs to Farms: The Transformation of the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1825
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In From Furs to Farm John Reda refocuses the usual eastern gaze that dominates histories of this era on the populated Illinois country. The region, over which flew the flags of France, Spain, Britain, and the United States across sixty tumultuous years, also played significant roles in the wars of the era. Further, territory that became the states of Illinois and Missouri is defined by experiences with these nation-states, particularly in terms of slavery, which was allowed in French and Spanish territory but abolished under the Northwest Ordinance, setting the stage for the future of these states in the upheavals that led to the Civil War. This study is a fine example of why we cannnot assume that U.S. history starts in 1776, adding to recent works highlighting the Great Lakes region and Mississippi Valley in the early national period. Historians of this era are increasingly realizing that these stories cannnot be told without recognizing the extent of indigenous and métis presence and cultural impact. While Reda gives some attention to the importance of relationships between the settlers of this region and the Osage, other native nations are skimmed over, lumped together, and assumed to have little interest in place. The relocation of eastern Indians to the region is noted but not investigated. Further, From Furs to Farms suffers from the general assumption that the only economic activity in the region in 1762 was fur gathering—ignoring the significant portion of regional exchange comprising indigenous and métis agricultural production, as other scholars such as Daniel H. Usner Jr. (Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 1992) and Susan Sleeper-Smith (Indian Women and French Men, 2001) have documented. This leaves readers with the misperception that indigenous people were transient and unconcerned with land, and it ignores the role of the Illinois country as the breadbasket of New Orleans.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".