Review of <i>One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader</i> Edited by Carol Higham and Robert Thacker
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Collectively the eight essays in One West, Two Myths provide readers with a solid introduction to the comparative approach to historical study. The forty-ninth parallel serves as the volume's focus. And though the surrounding region has had, and retains, certain social, cultural, and economic commonalities, the book clearly argues that the international border is real and meaningful-despite its geographical arbitrariness. The lead essays, by three senior historians of the Canadian and American Great Plains (Elliot West, Donald Worster, and Gerald Freisen) provide what are essentially historiographical engagements with the region as viewed through the prisms of social geography, the myth of development, and the NAFTA agreement, respectively. In three of the volume's subsequent case studies, Beth LaDow, Michel Hogue, and Sheila McManus place race at the center of their analyses to show the significance of the "medicine line" not only in the policies of the U.S. and Dominion governments, but in the political/economic strategies of various indigenous people. Indigenous agency and colonial manipulation get balanced treatment in discussions of Sioux and Metis spaces of sanctuary and oppression (LaDow), cross-border Cree travails (Hogue), and Blackfoot displacement (McManus). Following these, Molly Rozum and Peter Morris critically engage aspects of the history of newcomer settler communities in their chapters '''The Spark That Jumped the Gap': North America's Northern Plains and the Experience of Place" and "Fort MacLeod of the Borderlands: Using the Forty-Ninth Parallel on Southern Alberta's Ranching Frontier."
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.007 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".