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Record W4402508951 · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaae124

Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era

2024· article· en· W4402508951 on OpenAlexaff
Crystal Lynn Webster

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of American History · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMilitary history and social perspectives
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSpanish Civil WarPower (physics)Political scienceHistoryAncient historyLawPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Of Age is a thorough and extensively researched examination of underage enlistment in the Civil War—an understudied and illuminating phenomenon. It represents and contributes to the scholarly turn toward studies of childhood and age, underscoring the significance of children in American history. According to authors Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, scholars have overlooked children's enlistment during the Civil War due to their marginalization as children and because of sentimental and mythical representations of military regiments that mainly depict children as drummer boys or as soldiers who die tragic deaths. These narratives—popularized in the nineteenth century—have collapsed the historical narrative of child-soldiers into neatly packaged stories of heroism. On the contrary, the authors illustrate how the enlistment of children in the Civil War was much more than a literary trope. It was a complex political debate among children, parents, and elected officials decades in the making. Of Age begins with pre_Civil War debates over the enlistment of minors, beginning with the War of 1812, and other legal debates and definitions of minority and military participation of children. The second part examines motivations behind enlistment, including social and cultural conditions and influences. The final section focuses on male children's military enlistment in the Civil War. Central to these chapters is the tug-of-war between parents and political authorities over children's enlistment, with debates often playing out in fierce legal battles in court. With these areas of study, Of Age argues not only that children's enlistment is underestimated—constituting at least 10 percent of the Union Army—but also that their enlistment had wide-ranging consequences. Children's military participation also altered ideas and legal definitions of childhood, impacted household economies, shaped political movements, and, in some cases, affected military outcomes.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.045
Threshold uncertainty score0.090

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.005
Scholarly communication0.0040.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.272
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

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