Scott McLaren, Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pulpit, Press, and Politics highlights a topic that historians of education know well: there are many layers to the cultural significance of books.Books can provide insight into the economic practices of their time.They reveal dominant, as well as subversive, discourses of religion, politics, and citizenship.They can help us identify patterns in levels of literacy.They create communities of shared readers with the potential to make meaningful change.In this monograph, Scott McLaren explores many of these layers as he brings his expertise in the history of print culture to the setting of Upper Canada, exploring the connections between the transnational market for Methodist books and Upper Canadian religious identity.The book is centred around the relationship between Methodists in Upper Canada and the Methodist Book Concern, the publishing house of American Methodists established in New York in the 1780s.Immediately, it is made clear that the success of the Methodist Book Concern is easy to make sense of in the American context.It was because members of the Methodist Church were extremely loyal to their denomination, and supporting the Book Concern was a way to demonstrate this denominational loyalty.In contrast to this straightforward story of the Book Concern in the United States, the relationship between the Book Concern and its Upper Canadian supporters was far more complicated.This book moves chronologically, beginning in the 1790s when the market for Methodist books in Upper Canada emerged.In these early decades, the market was dominated by the Americans due to the popularity of American Methodism combined with the relative ease of book distribution through their travelling preachers.Still, through the 1810s to the 1840s, several distinct challenges appeared.These challenges included the anti-American sentiment that followed the War of 1812; Bishop Strachan's public attacks on American Methodism; the tensions brought by the increased presence of British Wesleyan leadership in the Canadian Methodist community; and the ongoing financial negotiations between the Canadian Methodists and their affiliated American institutions.The majority of this book highlights how those who were working with the Book Concern, and Methodist publishing in
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".