Bibliographic record
Abstract
When I was in my early twenties, I traveled from Honduras to Costa Rica and stopped over in Managua for a couple of nights, one of which took me to a concert by the folksingers Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy. It was there in Managua that I first learned about William Walker, the Tennessean that had declared himself president of Nicaragua and sought to spread slavery to Central America. But there was little in my Lonely Planet guidebook that could have prepared me for Michel Gobat’s Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. In June 1855, Walker and fifty-nine U.S. soldiers of fortune (Gobat’s term, “adventurers,” seems a bit euphemistic) sailed from San Francisco to Realejo, invited by Nicaragua’s Liberal Party to topple the Conservatives. Already we have a crucial point: Walker was there at the invitation of the Liberals and there was strong local support for his movement. Over the next two years, Walker led a rag-tag band of proslavery Southerners who, with no sense of irony, wanted to spread liberty, as well as abolitionists, suffragists, and European socialists who sought to liberate Central America’s masses from the local “aristocracies” that ruled them, and about a hundred exiles from Cuba who fought for “an inclusive form of Americanization in Walker’s empire” (134). Here, a second crucial point: if we think Walker’s expedition was primarily about expanding slavery, we are wrong. In Gobat’s analysis, the contradictions that beset Walker’s entire movement are the source of his enduring proslavery infamy. The most crucial contradiction was the regime’s attempt to carry out a social revolution that confiscated large estates to accelerate economic development, which key elements within his government thought they could do by importing “negro” slaves under the rule of white colonists.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.008 |
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".