BOOK ROUNDTABLE:<i>SEEDS OF DEMOCRACY</i>, BY MICHAEL J. LANSING
Bibliographic record
Abstract
examines the Nonpartisan League (NPL), an organization founded by a former socialist in North Dakota in 1915 that became one of the largest but least remembered and least studied challenges to major parties in U.S. and Canadian history. Lansing asks scholarly questions about past politics with the present in mind. As the book's jacket copy reads, "rather than a spasm of populist rage that inevitably burned itself out, the League is in fact an instructive example of how popular movements can create lasting change. Depicting the League as a transnational response to economic inequity, Lansing not only resurrects its story of citizen activism, but also allows us to see its potential to inform contemporary movements." 1 Because this historical sensibility of using the past to understand and even inform current politics so nicely overlaps with the sensibility of this journal-and arguably of the study of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from its very inception-we decided to make Insurgent Democracy the subject of the first of what we hope will become an annual book forum. We asked Annette Atkins, Gregg Cantrell, and Elizabeth Sanders for their assessments and reactions to the book's major arguments. We asked them not so much for book reviews, of the sort more or less obligated to cover the book's sweep, but rather for assessments and reactions to some of its major arguments from the vantage point of their own expertise. 2 What can we learn from the NPL and Lansing's account, either because he lays out convincing and important arguments, or because he gets things wrong or misses major issues? Can studies of such past mobilizations inform contemporary politics? Or is the NPL (and perhaps the larger agrarian tradition of which it seems a continuation) no longer a generative one?
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".