Zotero: an indispensable and free tool for historians and writers

I can't explain why, but I have neglected to post an item about Zotero before, and that was a massive oversight on my part. If you've ever found a book that might be useful for a research paper or project of any kind and wished you could have kept all the publication information but didn't remember the correct citation form, this is the program for you. And did I mention that it's free?


Zotero was created by historians to be used by historians, but it's also wonderful for anyone writing a paper in any discipline. It can be used to cite in MLA, AP, or Chicago Manual of Style (the style used by historians) or any number of other citation styles out there. So, if you were using one source for a history paper on slavery--say, a slave narrative--and wanted to use it for your English paper on writing styles, Zotero could insert a footnote and bibliography entry in MLA style for the English paper and Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) for your history paper--all with only one keystroke of change.

Zotero is a bibliography software. Every time you find a book or article or other type of source, an icon appears at the top of your Mozilla Firefox. Click that icon and Zotero does all the heavy lifting for you: it instantaneously downloads all the necessary information about the source and keeps it for you--forever. You create an online account and, presto, wherever you are that has Firefox and a connection to the Internet has your bibliography. Here is a screenshot of the bibliography I'm building for my latest research project on movie violence:

Not one word of these entries did I type! Zotero did it all for me. And, as you can see on the left menu, I have a number of different lists within my Zotero bibliography. These are always available to me as long as I have a computer and an Internet connection.

There's also a portable version of Zotero that you can carry around on your flashdrive, if you wish. But I recommend the cloud account. More on Zotero in later posts. For now, go to zotero.org and download it to your Firefox. Then watch your source list grow!

A great resource on the Civil War

This blog post is for my HIS 100 and 328 students. I know it's early in the semester, and both classes are still in the colonial era right now, but I came across a marvelous resource on the New York Times website today. It's a slideshow/timeline of the Civil War.

The Times is now a subscription newspaper, but it allows up to ten article views free each month, so you should all be able to access this site several times. I urge you to do so: it's very cool:

New York Times Civil War timeline. Click here. 

The Perils of Secondary Source Research

John Marshall is one of the most famous Americans of all time. He was the third chief justice of the United States and is credited at having created the modern Supreme Court. He also had a nasty relationship with his distant cousin, Thomas Jefferson. Although their political rivalry is one of the best known stories, some of the vitriol attributed to Marshall about Jefferson actually accrued from a miscopied quotation.

In 1916, Albert Beveridge wrote what would become the definitive biography of John Marshall. For decades, it stood as the single most important work on the great chief justice. And for decades, its quotations were copied by later scholars. Too lazy to look up the original source of the quotation, they had no idea that they were perpetrating a writing error—over and over again.

The story goes like this: When Jefferson assumed the presidency, the nation was divided politically between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. As you might remember, Marshall was  of the Federalist persuasion and Jefferson the leader of the new Democratic-Republicans. Writing about the new president, Marshall said, “The democrats [today we would capitalize that word] are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter, I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Sounds relatively mild and reasonable, right?

Change one word in that quotation, though, and the meaning becomes diametrically opposite Marshall’s intention; indeed, it becomes downright vitriolic. Here’s how Beveridge misquoted Marshall: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter, I am disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Big historical oops.

The bigger oops, though, came from the generation of scholars who accepted Beveridge’s quotation without going to the original source to check for themselves. Marshall was, as Jean Edward Smith has pointed out, painted as far more conservative than he actually was.[1]

Don’t make the historical oops. Find the original source whenever you possibly can. 

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[1] Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 18.

The Chief Justice: too much power?

A fascinating post in today's online New York Times by Supreme Court expert Linda Greenhouse details all the work that the chief justice of the United States must do. In addition to worrying about whether this is too much work, the more important consideration must be is this too much power to vest in one man--one man (so far) who is appointed for life.

You can read the post here, and I strongly encourage you to do so. This represents an agglomeration of power within one individual that might have horrified the framers of the Constitution. What do you think?