Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice. By GeorgeLakey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, George Lakey took a stand.Moved to action by the looming prospect of nuclear war, Lakey, then a graduate student in sociology, climbed upon a low wall by the student union building at the University of Pennsylvania and gave a soap box speech.He quickly found himself facilitating an impromptu town meeting.After several hours of lively discussion, others took the lead while George stepped down.His spontaneous action spoke to the moment and set a pattern for his lifelong commitment to nonviolent action for constructive social change.Raised by devout Methodists in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania, Lakey's memoir Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice describes his passage from working-class youth to Quaker social justice activist.He provides a rich and readable account of his more than six decades of activist engagement for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, peace in Vietnam, queer liberation, environmental justice, and a wide range of related issues.Lakey recounts the many mentors who shaped his thinking, the colleagues with whom he worked, the campaigns he helped to lead, as well as recalling the joys and burdens of family life, communal living, and coming out as a bisexual man.As with the memoirs of Lakey's activist contemporaries, such as David Hartsough, Brad Lyttle, and Jim Forest, who also devoted themselves to experimenting with the power of nonviolent direct action, Dancing with History provides a deeply personal yet historically grounded account of the many vines of activism with roots in the 1960s.Throughout his unique sojourn, Lakey has maintained an optimistic vision of making practical change through the power of democratic organizing and nonviolent action.Lakey cites his upbringing as starting him on his life's course.Hard work, family, and faith provided the foundations for him to begin his quest for a more peaceful world.He left home to enroll in West Chester State College, where he discovered Quakerism and ran afoul of the administration for his activism.He finished his undergraduate work at Cheney State Teachers College, the oldest historically black institution of higher education in the United States, as the only white male living on campus.During his college years, Lakey met Berit Mathieson, a Norwegian student who became his spouse.Together they became members of the Society of Friends and activist parents, adopting two children and having one of their own.The Lakeys spent time in Berit's native Norway, which exposed George to the advantages of Scandinavian social democracy.Lakey profiles several individuals as influential mentors and colleagues.He credits Ray and Cynthia Arvio for introducing him to Quakerism.Lakey first met Lillian Willoughby while picketing in support of the voyage of the Golden Rule, a sailing ship that attempted to deter atmospheric atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean, during the time her husband George served as a
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.058 | 0.023 |
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".