The shop at ‘the head of the Town-Dock, at the Corner of Wing’s Lane’: commercial space in Colonial Boston, 1758–1769
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nearly thirty years ago, Richard Bushman argued that ‘somewhere in their makeup, even small shops bore the seeds of mighty changes.’ In the three decades since Bushman’s claim, historians and material culture scholars have demonstrated that Anglo-American colonists were thoroughly enmeshed in the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ and the importance of consumer spaces to that process. However, because few colonial shops survive, the ‘makeup’ of eighteenth-century retail spaces – their layout and design, and the influence of these on consumer practices – has not been fully understood, particularly for pre-Revolutionary Boston. Weaving together textual fragments and surviving material objects, this article re-materializes and re-populates the shop where the middling merchant-shopkeeper Samuel Abbot worked between 1758 and 1769 and contextualizes it in reference to both colonial and metropolitan British spaces. Taking a micro-history approach, this article contributes to the literature on the physical spaces in which goods changed hands in colonial North America by adding Boston to studies of colonial retail spaces.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.004 |
| 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".