Print Submission Guidelines

Revised—September 2009

Manuscripts can be submitted via email in Word or RTF format to: Attn: Alan Lessoff, ahlesso [at] ilstu [dot] 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—between 6,000 and 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. 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 via email or on disk.

Please submit an abstract of 150 to 200 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 and credit lines with images and legends with 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, JPEG or TIFF with a resolution of at least 300 dpi, scanned at 4x6 in. or greater. Direct any questions about illustrations and figures 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, 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 rather than 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.
• 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. 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.

• The 1877 Strike at "Railroads and the Making of Modern America," http://railroads.unl.edu/topics/strike.php. (May 24, 2010)

*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.”