Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Submission guidelines and style guide, Revised—September 2007

The Journal's Plagiarism Policy

Manuscripts can be submitted via email in Word or RTF format to: <ahlesso@ilstu.edu>

Manuscripts may also be mailed in triplicate to:
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Department of History
Illinois State University, Box 4420
Normal, IL 61790-4420
Attn: Professor Alan Lessoff

Please include your name, academic affiliation, preferred mailing address, email, and telephone number in a cover letter or on a removable title page of your manuscript. As the journal uses anonymous, double peer review, authors should avoid placing their names on the first page, in a header, or anywhere in the text. Avoid personal references in the text or notes and omit acknowledgements until the article is accepted. Cite your own work as you would cite any author.

The target length for manuscripts is 25-35 pages of double-spaced text—6,000-10,000 words, not including notes—with one-inch margins and 12-point type. If the manuscript exceeds 35 text pages not including notes, 10,000 words not including notes, or 14,000 words including notes, please inquire before submitting it.

Authors may submit citations in the form of endnotes or footnotes, formatted in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. You may wish to consult William & Mary's History Writing Resource Center guidelines, which contain a straightforward set of documentation rules. Some basic formatting guidelines follow. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors will need to convert endnotes to footnotes and submit an electronic version in Word or RTF format on disk or via email.

Please submit an abstract of approximately 150 words with the manuscript. Upon acceptance of an article, authors should also submit a few sentences about themselves for the contributors page. After acceptance, authors may add acknowledgements, which should take the form of footnote 1, right at the end of the title.

Illustrations, tables, and figures are welcome. Please submit captions or legends with images or figures. If submitting electronically, please send illustrations in black and white in a low-resolution format that is easy to download, preferably JPEG or TIFF. Once a manuscript is accepted, authors will need to provide copies of images either as a high-quality photograph or printout or in a high-resolution electronic format, for example TIFF with a resolution of at least 300 dpi. Direct any questions about artwork to the editor.

Authors should be prepared to secure permission for images from the copyright owner, unless the material is public domain. Long quotations and quotations from poetry or song lyrics may also require permission. Authors will receive a copy of the journal and nine offprints. Authors should expect to sign our standard copyright agreement, which reserves to authors the right to use portions of their article in subsequent research and publication.

Formatting guidelines:

What follows are some basic formatting guidelines. For other matters, contact the editor or consult the current (15th) edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The journal departs in a few minor ways from the Chicago Manual, where that venerable manual seems too fussy.

Style within text:

“Smart quotes” and ‘apostrophes’

For dashes: – rather than --

Ellipses: keep closed up to text, e.g. “said. . .nothing.”

Numbers: spelled out up to 100, numerals for 100 and above use numerals for percents: e.g., 5 percent

Italicize all foreign-language words, book titles

1 space between sentences rather than 2

Follow American spelling conventions, e.g. favor, realize

Follow American practices regarding serial commas, e.g. hop, skip, and jump.

Format dates according to American practice—Mo. day, year—with months longer than three letters abbreviated.

Hyphenate compound adjectives with “century” as follows:
nineteenth-century politicians; early twentieth-century feminists; late nineteenth-century fashion. But no hyphens in nouns: “In the late nineteenth century, people began to bicycle.”

Ethnic/Racial compounds should remain open, even in the adjectival form, an exception to the rule regarding hyphenating compound adjectives: African American literature; Italian American neighborhoods. Of course no hyphen in noun form: Irish Americans.

Style within notes:

Book with a single author:

First citation: Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000), 120-37.

Subsequent citations: Stansell, American Moderns, 47, 309.

For a book that is a new edition of an older work, put the original publication date first:

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; Tucson, 2003), 107-09, 216-92.

A citation with multiple sources: Treat such notes as a complete sentence, so to list many citations in a row, separate each with a semicolon.  An exception: Several books from one author may be separated with a comma, without restating the author’s name:

See esp. Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage (New York, 1998), and Band of Brothers (New York, 2004).

Regarding place names in book citations: Like most people, if not the Chicago Manual, we now use “MA” as opposed to “Mass.” For smaller cities with well-known universities, omit the state: e.g., Chapel Hill, Urbana, New Haven, Princeton. On the other hand, include state abbreviations where needed to differentiate: e.g. Bloomington, IL, vs. Bloomington, IN. Cambridge, England, can stand alone as Cambridge, but Cambridge, MA, should include the state.

Book with an author and editor:

Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return, ed. Lincoln Steffens (1934; London, 1951).

Book with multiple authors:

First citation:

Walter Muir Whitehill and Lawrence Kennedy, Boston: A Topographical History, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 18-19.

Subsequent citations:

Whitehill and Kennedy, Boston, 243-47.

Multivolume works: Always use Arabic numbers to indicate volume numbers. Omit the word vol. if the volume number is immediately followed by a page number.

To cite a particular volume:

If volumes were published in different years, cite only the date of the referenced volume:

Author/Editor, Volume Title, vol. 1, Series Name (City, Year), pages.

If all volumes were published in the same year:

Author/Editor, Title (City, Year), volume number (eg., 1):pages.

Article from a journal: Give the volume number, month (or if applicable the season in upper case: Spring, Summer, etc.) of publication, and the year. For the first citation, use a colon after the close parentheses and then give the page number:

First citation:

Kyle E. Ciani, “Hidden Laborers: Female Day Workers in Detroit, 1870-1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (Jan. 2005): 23-51.

Subsequent citations (use a comma, not a colon, between abbreviated title and page number):

Ciani, “Hidden Laborers,” 29-32.

Article from an edited collection:

First citation:

Thomas J. Schlereth, “Burnham’s Plan and Moody’s Manual: City Planning as Progressive Reform” in The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New York, 1983), 75-99.

{Note: no comma before “in”}

Subsquent citations:

Schlereth, “Burnham’s Plan,” 88.

Dissertations:

First citation:

Melissa McLoud, “Craftsmen and Entrepreneurs: Washington, D.C.’s Late Nineteenth-Century Builders” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1988), 87-104.

Subsequent citations:

McLoud, “Craftsmen and Entrepreneurs,” ch. 4.

Website citations:

H. Wayne Morgan, “The Gilded Age: The First Generation of Historians,” H-SHGAPE Resources, http://www.h-net.org/~shgape/morgan.html (accessed Feb. 24, 1999).

Note: The date in parentheses is the access date. Be aware of the enormous decay of online sources.  The College of William & Mary offers detailed examples of online citations at: http://www.wm.edu/history/hwrc/worksheets/docelectronics.php (accessed Aug. 17, 2007).

Newspaper citations: In most cases, a newspaper may be cited without author, article name, or page:

New York Times, Dec. 3, 1914.

Occasionally, one will want to cite a newspaper article by author and title:

Monica Davey and Jodi Wilgoren, “Signs of Danger Were Missed in Troubled Teenager’s Life,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 2005.

Omit The from the names of newspapers.  For newspapers from before World War I, in almost all cases authors may omit section and page numbers, but indicate when an article comes from a supplement. If there is a reason to think specificity necessary, then do add, for example, Sec. B, p. 7.

Manuscript collections have no hard or fast citation rules. The Chicago Manual requires only that a subsequent researcher should be able to find the item. Use common sense and streamline where possible.

First citation from a collection:

Lewis Hine to Frank Manny, Aug. 7, 1910, Lewis Hine Collection, George Eastman House, Box 3, folder B.

Subsequent citations:

Lewis Hine to Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 9, 1911; Hine to Frank Manny, Dec. 12, 1912, Hine Collection, Box 4, folder C.

The National Archives is a fertile source of convolution and inconsistency:

A full citation from a National Archives document may take the form:

Document title, National Archives, Record Group Name, RG #, Entry # and/or name (if needed or available), Box #, Folder number or title (if available or needed).

After the first citation from any National Archives collection in an article, feel free abbreviate citations from all other collections as NA or NARA.

After the first citation of a record group, omit the name and abbreviate as RG x. For example, Records of the District of Columbia, RG 351, can become simply RG 351.

Abbreviations in notes:

esp. for especially

ch. for chapter

ed. or eds. for editor or editors of a collected volume cited by itself

2nd ed. for second edition

vol. for volume

Avoid Latin terms such as idem, passim, or op. cit.  Avoid ibid. as well, except in circumstances where common sense seems to demand it.