Colonial Legacies: The American Museum of Natural History, the Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Statue, and Public History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In November 2021, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) announced that the Theodore Roosevelt equestrian statue would be moved from the museum’s entrance to the not yet completed Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. The statue depicts Roosevelt riding ahead of semi-clad walking figures of a Native American and an African man. Long the subject and site of protests, this relocation was not the museum’s first attempt to address public concerns. Activists suggested it be simply removed, but others argued that Roosevelt was a significant figure, he should not be judged by present standards, and the statue provides a chance for public education. In response to earlier protests, the AMNH created Addressing the Statue, an exhibition that explored the statue’s origins and meanings as well as alternatives to it. The exhibition was organized to create a self-contesting historical space in which the precise meaning of the past — and its commemoration — was debated and left open. This article explores the character and nature of this space. It argues that this approach failed and could not erase the politics of colonialism the statue embodied nor create a new conversation about history.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".