Hockey, Violence, and Masculinity: Newspaper Coverage of the Ottawa ‘Butchers’, 1903–1906
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case study of violence and masculinity in Canadian hockey examines newspaper reports of Stanley Cup matches involving the Ottawa Silver Seven between 1903 and 1906. It assesses media narratives of rough and aggressive hockey in relation to gender and class identities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. Sports like hockey played a significant role in the social construction of masculinity during this time period, helping to counter the fear that overcivilization was making men weak, effeminate, and over-sophisticated. Media coverage of Ottawa’s championship hockey team frequently made reference to violent incidents and rough tactics. Newspapers constructed cultural narratives of hockey that combined elements of ‘brutal butchery’ and ‘strenuous spectacle’. These narratives spoke to different ways of experiencing and enjoying hockey, and to various tensions within public perceptions of the sport. Depictions of ‘brutal butchery’ combined outrage and fascination; accounts of ‘strenuous spectacle’ portrayed violence as part of an absorbing, masculine display. Thus, descriptions of robust and hard-hitting hockey expressed both ideals of respectable, middle-class masculinity and characteristics of rough, working-class masculinity. In addition, the admiration of rugged and physical hockey articulated in early twentieth-century newspaper accounts is still prominent in the culture of hockey today.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 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".