Punishment for a Wicked – The San Francisco 1906 Earthquake
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake of great magnitude ripped through San Francisco, destroying nearly one quarter of the city, leaving many dead, and thousands homeless and starving. Located on the San Andreas Fault line, San Francisco was susceptible to earthquakes. However, some believe that more than just shifting tectonic plates caused the 1906 earthquake. In fact, some people from the Los Angeles area believed that God had a hand in creating the earthquake to punish San Franciscans for their “sinful” and “wicked” ways. The lifestyle of San Franciscans was littered with prostitution, alcohol consumption, and corrupted government officials, all of which offended conservative Los Angeles residents. The southern California city was built, to a significant degree, on a foundation of conservative religious and moral ideas, brought by Protestant and “Puritan” migrants from the Mid-West at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In contrast, San Francisco was a city heavily populated and influenced by Irish-Catholics who had a history of drinking. In addition, gambling and prostitution had already been deeply rooted into the city’s daily life since the time of the California gold rush of the mid 1800’s. Using letters published in Southern Californian newspapers and collected in an early twentieth-century scrapbook archived at the University of the Pacific’s Holt-Atherton Special Collections Library, this paper argues that some conservative Southern Californians demonized San Franciscans, and believed they deserved the earthquake and fires as a punishment for their “wicked” and “sinful” ways. The ongoing feuds and disagreements between the two religions added to the already political differences among the cities fueled Southern Californian’s views that San Franciscans were to blame for the 1906 disaster.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".