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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".