Black slavery, historians and textbooks: A study of the representation of enslaved people of African descent in Quebec's historiography and history textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis studies how L'Esclavage au Canada Français: Histoire et Conditions de l'Esclavage, written by Quebec historian Marcel Trudel in 1960, influenced the representation of slavery in Quebec's historiography, newspaper articles and textbooks since 1960.Textbook studies typically refer to Quebec's national narrative in abstract terms and rarely discuss how national historians influenced slavery's representation in textbooks.I show that Trudel's argument about slavery's relative benignity in French Canada dehumanized enslaved people while humanizing their bondage.His argument was based on a comparison of enslaved people's living conditions with the French Antilles and what is now the United States.This comparison became central to the scholarly debate and provided a blueprint for the narratives offered in textbooks and newspaper articles, which centred slaveholders and statistics rather than the experiences of enslaved people.Black history in the 1990s and early 2000s reversed this tendency and contributed to a limited introduction of Black voices within newspapers and textbooks.Résumé Ce mémoire étudie comment L'Esclavage au Canada Français : Histoire et Conditions de l'Esclavage, écrit par l'historien québécois Marcel Trudel en 1960, a influencé la représentation de l'esclavage dans l'historiographie, les articles de journaux et les manuels scolaires du Québec depuis 1960.Les études antérieures sur les manuels scolaires faisaient référence au récit national du Québec en termes abstraits et discutaient rarement de la manière dont les historiens nationaux ont influencé la représentation de l'esclavage dans les manuels scolaires.Je montre que l'argument de Trudel sur la relative bénignité de L'Esclavage au Canada Français déshumanisait les esclaves tout en humanisant leur servitude.Son argument était basé sur une comparaison des conditions de vie des esclaves avec les Antilles françaises et les États-Unis d'aujourd'hui.Par la suite, cette comparaison est devenue un élément central du débat scientifique et a fourni un modèle pour les manuels et les articles de journaux, qui mettaient l'accent sur les esclavagistes et les statistiques plutôt que sur les personnes asservies.L'histoire des personnes noires dans les années 1990 et au début des années 2000 a inversé cette tendance et a contribué à une introduction limitée des voix noires dans les journaux et les manuels scolaires.iii To my grandmother, Marie-Anna Mathys-Schär (1923-2016) Pour m'avoir donné l'amour des livres et m'avoir montré la valeur de la curiosité.allowed me to bring together the different aspects of my project.Thank you for your kindness.I would also like to thank Professor Zucchi for undertaking my supervision early on in this project and for providing valuable guidance on my final drafts.It was also in Professor Zucchi's class that I took the first steps towards this research project.I would like to thank the Swiss Study Foundation, for the financial support for my graduate studies.I am incredibly grateful to my parents, Therese und Ferdinand Röthlisberger, who have supported me throughout my master's degree and without whom I could have never undertaken my graduate studies at McGill.Merci für öies Vrtrue!An incredible group of people who I can luckily call my friends kept me grounded particularly throughout the strange times that were the last six months.You, David Desrosiers, Vanessa Tampieri, Lea Frauenknecht, Gaétan Colussi, Ellie Wakabayashi, and Sonja Soo, are all incredible and I am unbelievably lucky to know you all.My partner, Islam Amine Derradji, was there when the idea for this project first was born, kept believing in it when I needed it most, and had to hear me talk about it way more than I should have expected of him.You understand my chaotic mind too well!You have given me more than I could
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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 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".