“Kno’ You’re Wally”: Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Pauline Hopkins’s <i>Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879) is a musical drama about a fugitive family transitioning from bondage to freedom. In her first theatrical piece produced, an ambitious Hopkins appropriates multiple performative and literary traditions – concertized spirituals, blackface minstrelsy, melodrama, the anti-slavery novel, slave narratives, and so-called Lost Cause literature – to reimagine enslavement experience. This essay examines how a young artist–activist blends and balances competing artistic forms while also pursuing the personal and national politics of gendered and generational transformations. On a personal level, Hopkins’s drama explores how a male fugitive discovers his value within family, how female fugitives reconsider popular archetypes like “Mammy” and “Topsy,” and how “new” citizens articulate individual conceptions of national belonging. Writing during the “radical” phase of US Reconstruction, Hopkins also interjects her fugitive family into national debates on how to memorialize the past, reconcile in the present, and reconstitute for the future.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".