17 July 2014 Four basic rules should guide our notetaking when we do historical research. Just four. If you can remember these, you can avoid all kind of needless heartache, dead ends, and charges of plagiarism.

15 July 2014 Nemo! No, we're not talking about a clownfish or Jules Verne's Prince Dakkar. We're speaking legalese. To quote ...

13 July 2014 Few readers like them. Even among lawyers and attorneys, who are often rapped for their dense prose, we hear complaints about the "inelegance" of overlong citations and the "burden" of footnotes filled with substantive matter that divert attention from the text itself. ... Two practices can help us reduce the "burden" of overlong citations. ...

11 July 2014 Both laws and legalese offer no end of quaint terms that had real, everyday, significance in past centuries. Today we look at two bits of legal slang invoked when witnesses gave cause to question their character ...

9 July 2014 It's a simple concept: Citations, like a lot of professions, have distinctive "uniforms." So dress 'em right! The police wear uniforms that identify them as law enforcement. Doctors and nurses wear uniforms that identify them as medical personnel. If we need a police officer, we don't look for somebody in a scrub suit, do we? Citations are also 'dressed' certain ways to identify what they are ...

7 July 2014 The debate continues. When we use an image copy, do we consider that to be an original or a derivative? As with all other aspects of research, it depends—which means it is a judgment call we make on the basis of a thoughtful evaluation of what we're using. That judgment is ...

5 July 2014 What trumps what when writing place names? Where do we draw the line between redundancy and clarity? ...

3 July 2014 What a wonderful site! ... DNA projects, census and passport projects, cadastral maps, landowner projects, archival inventories, and much, much more. ...

1 July 2014 Among the particularly valuable resources published by the National Archives is the preliminary inventory to Record Group 109, the so-called "Captured Confederate Records." On occasion, in one teaching venue or another, EE has invoked this guide. On occasion, then, a student has expressed dismay ...