<scp>Class, Relationships, and the Art of Historical Imagination:</scp> <i>An Oral History Interview with Daniel James</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. This oral history interview, conducted by four of his former doctoral students, explores the personal, intellectual, and methodological foundations of his pioneering work. James discusses his working-class upbringing in post-war England as the son of Communist Party militants, his formative experiences at Oxford during the late 1960s, and his introduction to Argentina during the politically charged early 1970s. The conversation traces his evolution from the social history approach of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (1988) through his methodological innovations in oral history with Doña María’s Story (2000) to his recent collaborative work on photography and memory in Paisajes del pasado (2025). James reflects candidly on the influence of E. P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, and the Latin American Labor History Workshop on his scholarship, while emphasizing the centrality of relationships, empathy, and historical imagination in his approach to working-class history. The interview also addresses his teaching philosophy, his commitment to graduate mentorship, and his view of history as a moral enterprise aimed at rescuing ordinary people “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” James concludes by outlining two prospective research projects on Argentine photography and political exile.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".