“Calm determination & cool brains”: Mary Chesnut’s God in the 1860s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In August 1852 the South Carolina belle Jane Caroline North visited the town of Saratoga, New York, with her aunt and uncle.While taking in the sights, North was surprised to meet another socialite from the Palmetto State, Mary Chesnut, who was traveling with her husband, James.Demonstrating that hard-edged approach to life that was every belle's prerogative, North was quick to judge Mrs. Chesnut."[S]he is friendly & agreeable," North wrote in her journal, "mais je ne l'aime pas" -I do not like her.A few days later, North elaborated on that damning indictment.Mrs. Chesnut "is certainly clever, & sometimes very amusing," she noted, "but she impresses me as a person who having gained a reputation rather beyond her merit, makes a constant effort not to fall short."Since 1981 1 scholars have had similarly ambivalent reactions to Mary Chesnut -and with good reason.Mary Chesnut and her husband were key players in the Confederate States of America, created when South Carolina and ten other states seceded from the American union during the winter of 1860-61.James Chesnut was an important figure in South Carolina politics and they were both good friends of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and his wife Varina.While hobnobbing with the great and good of the planter class, Mary Chesnut also kept a journal, tracing the rise and fall of the Confederacy with wit and insight.In 1905, nineteen years after Chesnut's death, D. Appleton and Company published a version of her journal, edited by Isabella Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary.Forty-four years later,
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".