Recovering Loyalism: Opposition to the American Revolution as a Good Idea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Loyalists, those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States, remain poorly understood in large part because of the teleological implications of framing the American Revolution as the inaugurating event of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. This essay shows loyalists as reasonable people who carefully assessed the specific colonial circumstances where each lived. The trajectory of three individuals, in particular, highlights the diversity of loyalism and that it drew support from all corners of colonial society. These three are the Mohawk diplomat Mary Brant, the slave-owning Georgia soldier William Martin Johnson, and the formerly enslaved Thomas Peters, who served with the British Army for the duration of the war. All three left the United States due to their ardent loyalism, dying, respectively, in Upper Canada, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. Prioritizing loyalists highlights the violence of the rebel movement and showcases the War of American Independence as a civil war. In place of a familiar patriot and US-nationalist interpretation, recovering loyalism as a good idea emphasizes loyalists in their colonial context, assesses the transformative impact of war, and follows their diaspora throughout the British Atlantic and, especially, to British North America.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".