‘Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources’ Achieves Two Objectives

Elizabeth Shown Mills latest book, Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources fulfills two goals: On the one hand, it replaces Ms. Mills first book on documentation, the 1997 guide to source evaluation and citation, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian, as a simple, portable text. On the other hand, it incorporates the core principles and templates built into the Fourth Edition of the far more comprehensive book, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, published in 2024.

As the author puts it, “Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources offers the best of both: the simplicity of the little Evidence! Updated with Evidence Explained’s critical instruction on the building of citations—including its game-changing universal templates that enable even beginner researchers to cite any type of historic record, in any form, no matter how or where it is accessed . . . . It offers a road map to help you avoid mistakes and guideposts to keep you safe as you explore new materials.”

To illustrate the guidelines for assessing and citing sources readers will find in Your Stripped Bare Guide, here are two samples for analyzing evidence and documentation that reflect the current thinking on both topics.