Why Was Louis Riel, a United States Citizen, Hanged as a Canadian Traitor in 1885?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In what sense was Louis Riel, a foreign citizen who had formally renounced his allegiance to Britain, a traitor to the Queen? And why did his adopted country, the United States, do nothing to protect him? Since the Canadian Naturalization Act of 1881 for the first time permitted emigrants to renounce their British allegiance, Riel's legal status was no different from that of any foreigner, and to charge a foreigner with treason was unusual and controversial. The United States, furthermore, had a history of advocating aggressively for citizens charges with crimes abroad, even when they were clearly guilty, and especially for political militants in Britain and Canada. Yet for a number of independent reasons, including decisions of courtroom strategy and the internal politics of the United States in 1885, Riel's lawyers and his adopted government chose not to raise his citizenship as an issue. The surprising silence about his US citizenship at the end of his life has distorted our historical understanding of Riel as a figure of the nineteenth-century Canadian-American borderland.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".