University of Iowa, Department of History
Teaching and Writing Center

Style and Citation

In order to present your ideas effectively in a history paper, you need to be able to cite primary and secondary sources correctly.  The most common style-books for historical writing are the Chicago Manual of Style and the Modern Language Association's guide.  Our guide to footnoting and bibliographic citation styles is derived from the Chicago Manual of Style. For a brief overview of commonly used citation forms for history papers, see

• Writing Center Guide to Bibliographic Forms

For additional help see also our:

• Guide to Quoting Smoothly

The links below will take you to others pages with online guides to style and citation:

• H-Net's Internet Citation Guide

• Chicago Manual of Style

• MLA

• Strunk's Elements of Style

If you need help learning what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it, visit our page on plagiarism. It includes the university's policy on plagiarism"

• Plagiarism

You might also check out our guide to Paraphrases and Quotes This page gives examples to help you learn to cite correctly and identify places where you need to cite primary sources or give credit to the ideas of other people when writing your own papers.

• Paraphrases and Quotes

This page was last updated 03/08/2007