HIST348: Peoples of Kansas

The assignment description for the critical book review assignment is posted under the tab “Assignments.” Be sure to read it carefully and email me if you have any questions.

If you have never written a history book review before, there are a few things to remember. First, a history book review is not the same as a book report; meaning, you must do more than just summarize the book. Second, it is very important that you know what the author is arguing and whether or not they use adequate evidence to support that argument. For other suggestions and guidelines, here are a couple of useful websites:

How to Write a Critical Book Review (by a professor at Carleton College)

On Writing Book Reviews (by a history professor at CUNY)

The second one also has a link at the bottom of the page to a guide for using footnotes. For history papers, you will not be using parenthetical citations (the MLA style) or the APA style. Footnotes look very similar to bibliographic citations–since they include most of the same information–but there are some subtle differences that you should be aware of. They are really easy to use once you get the hang of it. There is a guide to footnotes under the “Class Handouts” tab, but here is an example of a footnote for a plain old, regular book:

1
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 25th anniv. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23.

The “23″ signifies which page I am quoting or paraphrasing (remember that paraphrases must include a citation as well). The rest is self explanatory.

To add a footnote using Microsoft Word, put your cursor at the end of the sentence and outside the quotation marks (if you are quoting). Go up to “Insert” –> “Reference” –> “Footnote.” A box will pop up, and all those fields should be automatically correct, so hit “OK.” Your cursor will then be bumped down to the bottom of the page, where you insert the citation as shown above. When you are ready to resume writing, just put your cursor back up in the text and go!

It sounds complicated, but it is much, MUCH easier to use this feature than to try and add footnotes manually. It is very important that you use the correct citations for your sources, and that you remember that I take plagiarism very seriously. Each quotation must have a footnote immediately following it (right after those quotation marks), and paraphrases must also be acknowledged with a citation (of course, those won’t have quotation marks). For a quick review of how to avoid plagiarism, see the “Straight Talk about Plagiarism” brochure under the “Class Handouts” tab.