A Matter of National Dignity: Protection of Slaves and Southern Refugees in Canada, 1844–1869
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Canada's humanitarian tradition has been a pole of attraction to new immigrants and refugees and a source of pride for Canadians. As part of an ongoing research project on changing representations of refugees and immigrants in Canadian mainstream newspapers, this research note focuses on two groups of refugees who came to Canada around the time of the American Civil War. We discovered the two historical extradition court cases of refugees who were wanted by the US over allegations of criminality, by thematically analyzing Globe and Mail articles between the years of 1844-1869. Our analysis shows that the dominant ideological and thematic frame of refugee newspaper reporting at the time revolved around what Canada stood for, in terms of values, and who the Canadians were. Even though these two groups of refugees were represented differently, the issue of "the right to asylum" was never questioned and always deemed to be a manifestation of a putative, pre-confederation "Canadian" identity – which itself, in the newspaper discourse, rested on freedom, humanitarianism and the rule of law. We conclude this research note with contemporary reflections on our findings. Résumé: La tradition humanitaire du Canada a été un pôle d'attraction pour les nouveaux immigrants et les réfugiés et une source de fierté pour les Canadiens. Dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche en cours sur l'évolution des représentations des réfugiés et des immigrants dans les journaux grand public canadiens, cette note de recherche se concentre sur deux groupes de réfugiés qui sont arrivés au Canada à l'époque de la guerre civile américaine. Nous avons découvert les deux cas historiques d'extradition de réfugiés recherchés par les États-Unis pour des allégations de criminalité, en analysant thématiquement les articles de Globe and Mail entre les années 1844 et 1869. Notre analyse montre que le cadre idéologique et thématique dominant des reportages sur les réfugiés dans les journaux de l'époque tournait autour de ce que le Canada représentait, en termes de valeurs, et de l'identité des Canadiens. Même si ces deux groupes de réfugiés sont représentés différemment, la question du " droit d'asile " n'est jamais remise en question et est toujours considérée comme une manifestation d'une identité " canadienne " présumée, antérieure à la Confédération–qui elle-même est, dans le discours des journaux, non seulement un élément important de l'identité canadienne, mais reposait aussi sur la liberté, l'humanitarisme et l'État de droit. Nous concluons cette note de recherche par des réflexions contemporaines sur nos résultats.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".