4.16: Chicago Manual of Style Documentation

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Frost & Samra et al.
Kellogg Community College

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The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is the standard citation method in history. The CMS uses footnotes to cite sources in the body of the paper. A Bibliography follows the end of a paper.

Let’s say that you are writing a paper on the causes of the American Revolution. You have found two scholarly sources that you want to use. Here is how the sources would be cited in the body of the paper and on the Bibliography page:

Historian Joseph J. Ellis explains that the colonists came together in “common cause to overthrow the reigning regime.” 1

Other historians have attempted to find out what that cause, or causes, might be. According to Vernon Creviston, the origins of the Revolution could be found as early as the 1760s, but it was the Quebec Act of 1774 that broke “the bonds of loyalty” between the colonist and the king. 2 Yet neither the war nor its outcome were inevitable. 3

1. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 15.

2. Vernon Creviston, “‘No King Unless it be a Constitutional King’: Rethinking the Place of the Quebec Act in the Coming of the American Revolution,” The Historian 73 (2011): 465, doi:10.1111/ j.1540-6563.2011.00297.x.

3. Ellis, Founding Brothers , 5.

5 Bibliography Creviston, Vernon. “‘No King Unless it be a Constitutional King’: Rethinking the Place of the Quebec Act in the Coming of the American Revolution.” The Historian 73 (2011): 463-479. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.2011.00297.x. Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.