Stripped Bare Guide Explains “Construction Basics” of Historical Citations

The third chapter of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ masterful guidebook, Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources, lays out the criteria for the construction of citations. In a sense, this chapter specifies the building blocks that all citations must include in order to fully account for an historical source.  And, as Ms. Mills notes at the beginning of the following chapter on Universal Templates, “it is the mix and match nature of these building blocks . . . that will let you select the pieces of information” necessary to complete one of her citation templates. As we see from the building block, “the 5 Ws” described below, every citation must answer five questions: