Citation Guide for History Papers

Eastern Illinois University, History Department

Part I - Notes

2014 (previous versions 1999, 2006, 2011, 2012)

Newton Key, Melissa Greco, and Jon Burkhardt


Citation/referencing and bibliographic styles (MLA, APA, Chicago) differ. The History Department at Eastern Illinois recommends using the one most common in history monographs and journals: that abbreviated from The Chicago Manual of Style, also known as Turabian style. This citation guide conforms to both The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (2010) and to the latest edition of Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, which was revised after her death.(1) While many social sciences have gone to parenthetical references (shortened references in parentheses within the text), historians still rely mainly on footnotes or endnotes.(2) Journals which use notes sometimes modify Chicago Manual of Style slightly; and what follows does so too, but only by eliminating the publisher from the note (retaining it in the bibliography).

This paragraph gives examples of the most common references to printed works. Books by a single author (14.75) or by two (14.76) or more have long followed the same format, though note that p. and pp. have been discarded.(3) Articles may be by one author in a work by another (14.112) or a journal article (14.175).(4) (Note that page numbers precede the place of publication in the bibliographic form for the former [see Bibliography], while page numbers follow the date and a colon for the latter.) Articles in newspapers may have no author given (11.44).(5) And you may need to cite a secondary source of quotation (14.273). For example, "I sought for merit wherever it was to be found."(6) And well-known encyclopedias or reference books (14.247) are not listed in bibliographies, and only the edition is specified in the note. Lesser-known encyclopedias and dictionaries, however, should include publication information as shown, and are included in bibliographies (14.27).(7) For other special types of printed work refer to A Manual for Writers. Finally, you should shorten the second reference to a work already cited (14.25). Generally subsequent  (14.25) include the author’s last name, shortened title, (if needed, volume,) and page number.(8)

You might also want to refer to material solely drawn from the World Wide Web (or internet). That is many of the newspapers or joournal articles above are actually found online, but are in a pdf format, so look exactly like the print version; for those, you should generally use references as if they were printed (as in the notes to the previous paragraph). For other sources, which are in html, unpaginated format, you should make an online reference to the URL. For example, you might want to use the e-text of Moll Flanders from the Gutenberg project, which is part of the Universal Library at Carnegie Mellon University.(9) Again, facsimile pdfs -- such as the books from Early English Books Online (EEBO) or British Periodicals -- are best treated as printed books/pamphlets or newspapers and follow the examples for 3 and 5 above.


1. Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., rev. Wayne C. Both, et. al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

2. While I use footnotes here, most professors consider them interchangeable with endnotes. (Pick one or the other and stick with it.) Parenthetical references are compared with note references in Turabian, A Manual for Writers, ch. 15. The defense for such a vestigial usage is both practical and, of course, historical. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3. Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 49-50; Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackell, 2009), 59-60.

4. John Darwin, “Foundations of Empire, 1763-83,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 21; Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation,” ELH (English Literary History) 67, 1(2000): 45. [Note for journal articles, Zotero, using information provided by JStor, etc., often provides a publication date for journals as (October 1, 2005); but, unless it is a weekly or daily publication, the month alone is accurate, thus (October 2005).]

5. The London Gazette, 14-17 July 1716.

6. [William Pitt the Elder], Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), 1:294, quoted in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 103.

7. John P. Wright, “Reason,” in A Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century World History, ed. Jeremy Black and Roy Porter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 50. [For an alphabetically organized work, like the Oxford English Dictionary or the Dictionary of National Biography, it is usually sufficient to reference the entry, say, "William Shakespeare,” preceded by “s.v.” (short for sub verbo, which means “under the word”) and not the page numbers.]

8. Thus, the subsequent reference to the sources in footnote 3 above would be Brotton,49-50 [or, if you have more than one Brotton, Brotton, Trading Territories,, 49-50]; and Bucholz andKey, 59-60 [or if you have more than one Bucholz and Key, Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England, 59-60].    

9.Sharon Howard, “Sarah Gale,” London Lives, last modified September 2010, http://www.londonlives.org/static/GaleSarahc1767.jsp. For an EEBO example, the anonymous pamphlet would be cited as The History Of the Late Great Revolution in England And Scotland: With the Causes and Means by which it was Accomplished (London, 1690).


Part II - Bibliography

last updated February 12, 2014