Guide to Citing Your Sources

Citing sources serves two functions:

1.  It allows readers to see where you are getting your evidence, which in turn allows them to assess the validity of your claims.

2. It credits other people for their ideas and honors their intellectual property.

Proper citation of sources is extremely important. Taking portions of text or ideas from another person without crediting them through citation is plagiarism. Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty, as it is a way of claiming credit for words or ideas that are not your own. Plagiarism is also an academic integrity violation, and one that both the University of Arizona and the History Department take very seriously. By department policy, students who commit plagiarism are awarded a grade of ‘E’ for the class and reported to the Dean of Students for potential disciplinary actions.

DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. CITE YOUR SOURCES.

You should cite your sources when

• You quote directly from a text

• You paraphrase something an author has said

• You reference or use another scholar’s argument or interpretation

Example: If you wanted to state in a paper that the Salem witch trials were caused by conflicts between the residents of Salem Village and Salem Town over the future of the settlement, you would need to cite Boyer and Nissenbaum when making this claim. They are the people who initially came up with that interpretation of the trials, and they deserve the credit for it.

• You take specific, factual information that is not general knowledge from a text

• You’re not actually sure if you need to cite, but you suspect you might. Better safe than sorry!

Historians and history students use Chicago or Turabian style citations when citing their sources. This is probably a style that is unfamiliar to you. In high school, you were probably instructed to use Modern Language Association (MLA) citations, or what you might have known as parenthetical citations. Here is an example of a parenthetical citation:

Christopher Columbus claimed in his diary that Native Americans had no religion and that they would be receptive to Christian conversion (Columbus 39).

Note that the document here is only referenced using the author’s last name. In order to get the full citation information, you would need to refer to an alphabetical Works Cited page included at the end of the essay. MLA citations are usually used in literature and language classes. 

Historians do not use parenthetical citations and very seldom use Works Cited pages for short essays. Instead, historian use footnotes that are inserted after sentences that require citation. Footnotes look like this:

Note that a footnote involves the insertion of a small superscript number after a sentence containing information that needs to be cited. The reader can then glance down at the bottom of the page to the relevant footnote—in this case, number 1—in order to view the complete citation information for the document that is being referenced. There is no need for a separate Works Cited page, as all of the required information about the text is included in the footnote.

For the purposes of this class, you do not need to know how to formulate footnotes. Instead, all you need to do is identify the source you wish to cite (listed below) and copy and paste the citation into your footnote. Note that the first time you cite a source, you use a long citation that contains all required information. All subsequent times you cite the source can take the form of an abbreviated citation. Note also that the red text indicates areas where you will have to fill in the correct information; the black text should remain verbatim in your footnote.

Citation of American Yawp textbook chapter

First citation:

“Chapter Title,” in The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 1: Before 1877, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). URL of Chapter

All subsequent citations: 

“Chapter Title,” in The American Yawp.

Citation of Columbus

First citation:

Christopher Columbus, Date of Journal Entry, “Journal of Christopher Columbus, 1492,” in The American Yawp Reader: A Documentary Companion to the American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). http://www.americanyawp.com/reader/the-new-world/journal-of-christopher-columbus/

All subsequent citations: 

Columbus, Date of Journal Entry.

Citation of Las Casas

First citation: 

Bartolome Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, ed. Franklin Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), PAGE NUMBER.

All subsequent citations:

Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies, PAGE NUMBER.

Citation of Smith

First citation:

John Smith, “Captain John Smith Describes the Natives of Virginia, 1612,” in Major Problems in the History of the American South, Vol. 1, eds. Sally McMillan et al (Boston: Cengage Press, 2011), PAGE NUMBER.

All subsequent citations:

Smith, “Captain John Smith Describes the Natives of Virginia, 1612,” PAGE NUMBER.

Citing information contained in lecture

Don’t. Any information contained in lectures is considered common knowledge for the purposes of this class. Common knowledge does not require citation.