Bibliographic record
Abstract
The story of the underground railroad is often used to tell the history of slavery in the United States. It is seen as a more attractive story in what is a difficult history. The underground railroad narrative typically presents Canada as the terminus of the underground railroad and the place in which the fugitive slave from the United States is able to enjoy freedom. In this paper I examine a board game produced in the United States for schoolchildren. This aims to teach young people about the history of slavery in the United States. I discuss how this board game presents Canada. I argue this game presents Canada as an anti-slavery haven and the endpoint of the underground railroad. I suggest that Canada functions in this game not as a place with a history or a narrative of its own but as a vehicle for telling the history of American slavery. Then I examine two contemporary texts produced in Canada which tell the narrative of the underground railroad. I argue that these texts borrow and shape American narratives of the underground railroad. They prioritise the narrative of the underground railroad over other less savoury parts of Canada’s history. The enslavement of Africans, and aboriginal persons, took place in colonial Canada and New France under the British rule (post 1760). The printed records for enslaved persons in colonial Canada become scarce in the early phase of nineteenth century. The black loyalists who travelled to Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution faced discrimination and were given poor plots of land, if any at all upon their arrival. This paper argues these Canadian texts recreate the image of Canada as a haven, and that this serves to silence Canada’s own history of slaveholding and its poor treatment of the black loyalists.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".