What did Christopher Columbus once mean to Haiti? Émile Nau’s <i>Histoire des Caciques d’Haïti</i> and Irving’s <i>Columbus</i> in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay responds to scholarship on nineteenth-century representations of Christopher Columbus, by reinscribing Haitian writing on Columbus into transnational approaches largely focused on the US and Latin America.Throughout this essay, I contend that Émile Nau's Histoire des caciques d'Haïti (1854) was profoundly influenced by Washington Irving's A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).In particular, I show how Nau reframed Irving's text in nationalist terms to reimagine Columbus as the catalyst of modernity while asserting the centrality of Haiti to his life.To do so, I compare key passages in Nau and Irving to reconstitute Nau's enigmatic methodology and to show how Nau adapted Irving's text to inscribe Columbus within his vision of Haitian history that included the Spanish colonization of Hispaniola.This analysis reveals the ways in which Haitian cultural nationalism drew from and spoke back to the larger network of nineteenth-century Atlantic nationalisms.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".