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
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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 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".