Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical writing on North Atlantic postal communications in the mid-nineteenth century has mostly focused on the gradual ascendancy of the Halifax-based Cunard Steamship Company, which completed its first transatlantic postal voyage in 1840. Largely overlooked in this literature is the long and often ideologically charged debate in the United States over the propriety of subsidizing postal transportation outside of the country’s territorial boundaries. A pivotal event in this debate was the 1849 confrontation in the U.S. Senate between Ohio Democrat William Allen and Connecticut Democrat John Niles. Allen opposed postal subsidies: in his view, the U.S. government should subsidize the circulation of information on public affairs, but not commercial correspondence. Niles, a former postmaster general, supported subsidies as a necessary adjunct to trade. To buttress his point, Allen ventured a remarkably expansive historical comparison between ancient Greece, where the absence of a postal system made representative government impossible, and the modern United States, where the postal system undergirded democratic politics. This debate effectively ended in 1851, when the U.S. Congress rejected its longstanding commitment to balancing postal revenue and postal expenditures, a victory for Niles. While forgotten today, this debate – and the comparable debate in the British Parliament over mail subsidies – is significant for at least two reasons. First, it marked an early chapter in the still-evolving debate over the role of national governments in what we would today call global information policy; and, second, it spawned a remarkably enduring visual iconography that popularized the figures of John Bull and Uncle Sam.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
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".