Online Submission Guidelines

Proposals for online projects can be submitted via email to: jmcclyme [at] assumption [dot] edu . We are especially interested in ideas about fostering online scholarly and pedagogical dialogue. We will publish several sorts of projects:

• Materials that complement articles published in the print journal and allow the reader to explore one or another aspect of the essay in greater depth.
• Materials that explore pedagogical opportunities afforded by articles published in the print journal.
• Original research on any of the topics covered by the Journal where the use of images, media, and/or software suggests or requires online publication.

These web-based projects will go through the same process of peer review as materials submitted to the print Journal.

Authors must provide a permanent online url, if their project requires more than 5 MBs of space.

Please include your name, academic affiliation, email address, and telephone number. As the journal uses anonymous, double peer review, authors should avoid placing their names on projects. Cite your own work as you would any author.

Published projects can be of any length and may employ any media or software appropriate to web-based publication.

Authors must submit citations as footnotes linked to the appropriate place in the project. Citations should be formatted in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition.

Please submit an abstract of 150 to 200 words with the project. Upon acceptance, 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, at the end of the title.

Illustrations, tables, and figures are welcome as are audio and video files, interactive maps, and other media. Please submit captions and credit lines with images, audio, and video and legends with figures and maps. Direct any questions about illustrations and figures to the editor.

Authors should be prepared to secure permission from copyright owners, unless the material is public domain. Long quotations and quotations from poetry or song lyrics may also require permission. Authors should expect to sign our standard copyright agreement, which reserves to authors the right to use portions of their project 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, 15th edition (CMOS). The journal departs in a few minor ways from the CMOS. At times, that venerable manual seems too fussy or arbitrary

Style within Text

• Use “Smart quotes” and ‘apostrophes.’
• For dashes: — rather than --
• Ellipses: leave one space on both sides—e.g., “said … nothing”
• Numbers: spell out up to 100; use numerals for 100 and above; and use numerals for percents—e.g., 5 percent.
• Do not superscript ordinals—i.e., 108th; if they can be spelled out in one or two words, do so—e.g., second or twenty-second.
• Italicize all book, journal, magazine, and newspaper titles.
• Italicize all foreign-language words.
• 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. Abbreviate all months except May, June, and July.
• Follow American practice regarding quotations—i.e., double quotation marks and punctuation inside the quotation marks:

The teacher said, “Take your book.”
Or: “Take your book,” said the teacher, “before I lose my patience.”

• 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.

• Unless there is a reason to do otherwise, use “U.S.” as an adjective and “United States” as a noun:

“Blundering U.S. diplomacy” versus “The United States sometimes engages in diplomacy.”

Style within Notes

Regarding place names in book citations:
Like most people, if not the CMOS, 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 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.

Book with an author and editor/translator:

• First citation: Randolph Bourne, The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1956), 127–29.
• Subsequent citations: Bourne, History of a Literary Radical, 134.

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.

*Note: For books (or articles) with more than three authors/editors, list only the first, followed by et al.—e.g., Smith et al., Book Title (City, year).

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. Restate only the author’s last name:

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

Multivolume works:

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

To cite a particular volume:

• First citation: Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital, vol. 2 (New York: 1916), 574; or, alternatively: Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital (New York: 1916), 2:574.
• Subsequent citations: Bryan, History of the National Capital, 2:574.

Journal articles:

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. In general, omit the issue number. If, however, you accessed the article via an online service that does not provide the month of publication, and that information is not evident from the online version of the article itself, then issue numbers are acceptable in the format: Vol.:no. (Year): pp; for example, 8:3 (2009): 367.

• 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: Ciani, “Hidden Laborers,” 29–32. {Note: Use a comma, not a colon, between abbreviated title and page number.}

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:

The prefix “http://” is optional when the URL begins with “www.” The date in parentheses is the access date. Be aware of the decay of online sources.

• 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 College of William & Mary offers detailed examples of online citations at: http://www.wm.edu/as/history/undergraduateprogram/historywritingresourcecenter/handouts/documentingelecsources/index.php

Newspaper citations:

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 should indicate when an article comes from a supplement. If there is a reason to think specificity necessary, then do add, for example, Sec. B, 7. 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.

Mass-Circulation Magazines:

Treat similarly to newspapers, omitting volume information.

• Harper’s Monthly, June 1896, 372–76; Nation, Nov. 7, 1872, 24.

Professional or organizational publications:

These can be a judgment call in terms of treating them as magazines or as specialized periodicals.

• James H. Eckels, “The Association of Credit Men as Viewed by the Banker,” The Lawyer and Credit Man 8 (May 1898): 8; or
• James H. Eckels, “The Association of Credit Men as Viewed by the Banker,” The Lawyer and Credit Man, May 1898, 8.

Manuscript collections:

These have no hard or fast citation rules. The CMOS requires only that a subsequent researcher should be able to find the item. Folder numbers are preferred. At a minimum, supply a box number, reel number, or similar locating information for unpublished documents. Use common sense and streamline where possible.

• First citation from a collection:Lewis Hine to Frank Manny, Aug. 7, 1910, folder 6, box 3, Lewis Hine Collection, George Eastman House.
• Subsequent citations:Lewis Hine to Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 9, 1911; Hine to Frank Manny, Dec. 12, 1912, folder 7, box 4, Hine Collection.

Documents from the National Archives:

The National Archives is a fertile source of convolution and inconsistency. After the first citation from any National Archives collection in an article, feel free to abbreviate citations from all other collections as NA or NA–College Park. After the first citation of a record group, omit the collection name and abbreviate as RG x. For example, Records of the District of Columbia, RG 351, can become simply RG 351. If you have all the information, a full citation from a National Archives document may take the form:

• Division of Venereal Diseases to Oregon Social Hygiene Society, Nov. 25, 1918, folder 1918–19, file 235.4, box 90, entry 42, U.S. Public Health Service, Record Group 90, National Archives, College Park, MD.

At a minimum, this will suffice:

• Charles Brand to Samuel Harrison, Feb. 17, 1917, box 285, Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, Record Group 16, National Archives, College Park, MD.

Congressional Globe or Congressional Record:

• Congressional Record, 61st Cong., 2nd sess. (May 5, 1910), 5823–30.

Congressional Serial Sets:

For shorter Serial Set documents

• “Expenses of the Government of the District of Columbia,” 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 5, 1920), H rept. 531.

For full-length reports or books published in the Serial Set

• Charles Moore, ed., Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, 57th Cong., 1st sess. (Jan. 15, 1902), S rept. 166, 44–45; or Charles Moore, ed., Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia (Washington, 1902), 44–45. {*Note: In the second case, the Government Printing Office serves as the publisher.}

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
• trans. for translator
• vol. for volume

Avoid Latin terms such as idem, passim,or op. cit. Use “ibid.” where common sense seems to demand it. The CMOS wisely advises not to italicize “ibid.”