Book Review of Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Polygamy: An Early American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This volume is a strikingly original interdisciplinary study of the diverse practices of polygamy in America from 1500 to 1900. Polygamy was a cornerstone of a number of Native American and African-American civilizations, Pearsall shows, just as much as monogamy was a cornerstone of the American colonies and young American republic. Small wonder then, that American colonization and expansion onto the western frontier brought an inevitable "clash of civilizations"—with fights over the form and the function of the family as a central battleground. The book offers exquisitely documented case studies of these clashes from Mexico to Quebec, from New England to southern California, together with the more familiar federal clash with the new Mormon communities. The law and theology of marriage get blurred a bit with the author's laser sharp focus on the diverse practices of polygamists and the predictable pugilism of monogamists, but this book is highly commended.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.049 | 0.030 |
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".