The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana. By Mark T. Johnson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky is based on the important and well-accepted premise that historians and audiences need to know more about the lives of Chinese people in nineteenth-century America and in the diaspora from the perspectives of the Chinese (in America and abroad) themselves. Working with this compelling idea, Mark T. Johnson offers a fascinating history of the Chinese diasporic experience in Montana from 1870 to the 1950s, using previously ignored and untranslated collections at the Montana Historical Society. Indeed, Johnson’s attention to sources makes this work critical reading for scholars interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and transnational relations, as well as historical methods. The latter will be especially engaged by his accounts of the translation work undertaken by student and inter-generational volunteers, which speak to methodological challenges and conceptual possibilities of this approach. Johnson’s scholarship reveals what is possible when using a trove of “local” sources to pursue diasporic research (the content of the letters and the international nature of the correspondence challenge received notions of what we mean by the term “local”). In a wide-ranging analysis, Johnston explores the lynching of Ah Chow in 1870 (described in a manner that evokes Beth-Lew Williams’s analysis in The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America), the activities of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, the 1905 anti-U.S. boycott in China (and the material impact in Montana), Chinese women in Montana, burial rituals, and how people navigated immigration restrictions in the Cold War. The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky is a compelling diasporic analysis that explores how the lives of Chinese residents in Montana were simultaneously rooted in place and shaped by concerns abroad.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".