French Roots in the Illinois Country: the Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carl Ekberg has done it again.French Roots in the Illinois Country, like his earlier study of Ste.Geneviève, Colonial Ste.Geneviève: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier ('1985), is a model of social history that masterfully illuminates the French experience in the upper Mississippi valley.Few if any historians have looked at this region as closely or as well as Ekberg.That the French were the first Europeans to settle in the region is an essential part of the warp and woof of "American" history.Carl Ekberg has done a great service by explaining how they did so.Frenchmen first visited the middle Mississippi vaUey during the last third of the seventeenth century, and they began to establish a permanent presence toward the end of the century.As interesting and colorful as the stories of La Salle and Tonti may be, however, Ekberg tells here the more prosaic story of the communities settled after 1700 by men and women who came here to make their lives as most ]3eople did in those days, by farming the land.Despite similarities to Quebec and Louisiana, the Illinois country evolved in a unique pattern of land use, settlement, and agriculture based on traditional French rural practices.According to the author, the urüque configuration of land use in the region had important implications not orüy for the organization of society, but also the mentalité of the inhabitants.Ekberg's six chapters revolve around French longlots; Illinois country settlements; open-field agriculture; settlers, servants, and slaves; agricultural practices; and agricultural commerce in the Mississippi vaUey.Ekberg clearly knows the extant priniary sources-French, Spanish, and American-with the intimacy bom of decades of study, and he knows how to wring everything he can from them.Ride through the Illinois and Missouri countryside with him, and you know he has learned the land not only as an ideal from the docimients, but on many a sweaty or chilly walk over the settlements and farms he writes about.That makes a difference, because he sometimes finds that the reality did not always conform to what the documents described.He also knows the rural France from which these settlers came, which allows him to explain this unique country as no one else can.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".