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.

References

References should follow the following form:

Authors: first name first

Titles: magazine, newspaper, or journal articles it quotation marks. The titles of magazine, newspapers, and journals themselves in italics. Followed by volume and issue numbers (if available)

Titles of books in italics set it Title Case.

Publication dates: always in parentheses after publication information.

Bibliography

Authors: Last name first

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.

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.