CZ:History Workgroup/Style Guide

If you are in the History Workgroup, please contribute to the style guide for history articles. Please also follow our agreed style. Thanks.

Citation Style

Chicago citation style 1.

Note References

Note references should follow the following form:

Authors: first name first followed by a comma. Multiple authors are listed as they are on the title page up to three authors. If using editor as author, the editors' list of names is followed by "ed." Always end authors' section with a comma.

Titles: magazine, newspaper, or journal articles are set in quotation marks followed by a comma. The titles of magazine, newspapers, and journals themselves are set in italics, followed by volume and issue numbers (if available). No comma is placed between periodical name and issue number.

Titles of books are set in italics and set in Title Case. Named volumes of a multi-volume work are set in quotation marks following the title.

Publication Data: Books always in parentheses after publication information. Publication information includes the place of publication unless duplicated in the publisher (i.e. "Princeton University Press" not "Princeton: Princeton University Press" but note: "New York: Oxford University Press"), publisher, and date of publication. For reference notes, this information is always set in parentheses. This information is not included for periodicals.

Publication Data: Periodicals for magazines and journals, only the month and year are placed in parentheses. For newspapers the date of publication is listed normally and not in parentheses: November 23, 1963.

Note references should include the page number to the exact pages that are being referenced, unless the entire volume or article is being referenced. Using "p." to denote a page number is not necessary as everyone should know that at this point in the reference, you are listing a page number. Using "p." may be needed if you are referencing a particular note on a page, for instance "p. 345, n. 37" which is a reference to page 345, note number 37. Numbers without lettering are assumed to be a page references.

The entire note reference is ended with a period unless additional citations are included. In that case separate references with a semi-colon.

Examples

Harold Dean Cater, comp., Henry Adams and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), xvi-xvii.

Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, volume 12, "Leyte, June 1944-January 1945" (Boston: Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1970), 4.

David B. Johnson, "The 'Government Man': Edwin E. Witte of the University of Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History 82, no. 1 (Autumn 1998), 34-36.

Bibliography

Authors: Last name first

Naming Conventions

For Laws, Court Cases, etc.

Laws passed by and bills under consideration in a legislature are capitalized as title case, including the words "Act" or "Bill", but not otherwise formatted, not bold, nor italized, nor set in quotation marks.

Court Cases are also capitalized as title case and italicized, but not otherwise formatted.

Laws and Court Cases should be linked.

Historiography, bibliography, external links

Let me mention one example, but it's a general concern with historiography. I'll observe, in passing, that I believe that there's no good reason to have separate Bibliography and External Links: a given print book might move from one to the other because the copyright expires and someone scans it. As an informal convention, what would people think of only using Bibliography?

While Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain tends to be treated extremely well in historical works, there are several articles that suggest that most historians depend too much on his own writings, which are voluminous and often beautifully written. Now, I hate to call anything revisionist history, but there are also some authors that go more deeply into his important relationship with his wife, some known as feminist historians.

Where should this sort of discussion take place? It makes a certain amount of sense in Bibliography. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:36, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Since you asked, here's my take on how these should be used within the history work group: Russell D. Jones

Bibliography subpage should be an annotated list of print sources. If the publication is available also online, then it should be linked (I prefer piped external links of the article or book title). If the article is about a person, then the bibliography should have at least two sections: Works by the subject and works about the subject. The bibliography should be annotated, which means that there should be some commentary from the history work group about the value of the source. An annotated bibliography does not need to include every source available about a particular subject. A print source that on which the copy right has expired and is now available in full on the web would be listed in the bibliography, not as an external link. A bibliography subpage can include references to archival collections, if available.

Works subpage: If the article is about a person then the works subpage should be a complete list of writings by the subject arranged chronologically. These works do not need to be annotated but should be linked if CZ has articles on them, and should be linked to a source if available elsewhere on the www.

External Links subpage: this is a page that lists other web pages. Print (or other published) sources available online should not be listed here but on the bibliography (or discography, etc.) page.

For a good example of how I used these pages see the Arthur J. Altmeyer cluster of pages.

Regarding historiographical debates (Debate Guide subpages), see how I handled the question of whether Jefferson's naval policy was good or bad in the Thomas Jefferson/Debate Guide (it links from Thomas Jefferson#President: Troubled second term, 1805-1809). This was not how the Debate Guide was originally intended to be used (I think), but it works well for discussing these debatable points of historiographical interpretation.