With God on Their Side: William Booth, The Salvation Army and Skeleton Army Riots
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Known and widely respected today for its social work, the Salvation Army in the late nineteenth century faced considerable opposition. With God on Their Side focuses on a three-way conflict, between the Army, with its flags, brass bands, military terminology, and provocative methods of evangelism, communities who resisted the Army’s ‘invasions’ with jeers and brickbats, and local authorities trying to keep the peace, whether by suppressing the rioters or stopping the Army’s marches. Although the dominant motif is the violence courageously absorbed by the Salvationists, it is evident that the Army sought to provoke, courted publicity, and readily adopted the language of martyrdom. The book offers a detailed narrative of unrest, mostly in coastal towns across southern England from Exeter (1881) to Eastbourne (1891–92), drawing on local histories and press reports. A concluding chapter picks up the historiography of antagonism, reflecting on the disruptive impact of the Army in small, conservative towns and on the collusion in some places between local elites and the self-styled ‘Skeleton Army’, which set out to frustrate the Salvationists’ efforts. There are some minor slips in the text—George Lansbury was a Christian Socialist and more sympathetic to the Salvation Army than many on the political Left, but he was not a Salvationist. Read in conjunction with studies like Pamela Walker’s Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down (2001), With God on Their Side provides much helpful material for the early history of the Salvation Army.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".