Historians are trained to distrust anything without a footnote. Read the Smart Women Write archive by theme and a quieter subject keeps surfacing next to the familiar ones about dissertations and day jobs: where knowledge comes from, who gets credit for it, and what happens to a story when nobody writes it down. Angela Sutton wrote all of these posts. Taken together they work as a short course in sourcing, taught by someone who worked with the Slave Societies Digital Archive and gave up many Saturdays to film oral histories.
Six thousand words for a hill in Nashville
In September 2017 Sutton described drafting the first U.S. nomination to the UNESCO Slave Route Project for Fort Negley, the Union fort south of downtown Nashville that was built largely by enslaved and free Black laborers. The hard part, as she tells it, was not finding material. It was cutting it. The nomination had to fit into 6,000 words, and she had far more material than that, including the contraband camps, the United States Colored Troops who defended it, and the neighborhoods freed people built around the hill after the war.
What she did with that problem is worth copying. She did not pretend to start from nothing. She named the people whose work she was building on, among them Krista Castillo, Gary Burke, Bill Radcliffe and Bobby Lovett, along with the reenactors and volunteers who had kept the site’s history alive while the city looked away. A nomination is a persuasive document, and a persuasive document that credits its predecessors is harder to dismiss. It worked. In May 2019 Fort Negley was recognized on the Slave Route, and Sutton, who had written the application, spoke at the press conference there.
When the source is a person
Four months after the nomination post, she wrote about building the Fort Negley Oral History Archive with a working group at Vanderbilt. The plan was simple to state and slow to carry out: find descendants of the fort’s builders and defenders, film their stories, edit and transcribe them, add metadata with the librarians, and put everything online, free, for good. By early 2019 the work had a name, the Fort Negley Descendants Project, and in Double Your Digital Archive she described a single meeting of a genealogical society that booked her small team for the rest of the semester.
These two posts are the most useful thing in the archive for anyone planning interviews of their own, partly because Sutton is candid about the mechanics. Someone has to rent the camera. Someone has to decide who is included and who is left out, and the group planned to publish an article explaining exactly those choices. A student about to record interviews for a class project faces the same questions on a smaller scale: what exactly you are asking, whom you can realistically reach, how consent will work, and where the recordings will live when the semester ends. A plain guide to collecting data for a research project covers sampling, interview instruments and consent, and makes a decent checklist before you knock on anyone’s door.
The encyclopedia entry as a teaching document
An earlier post asks whether to write that encyclopedia article when a reference publisher comes calling in the summer. Sutton’s answer is a qualified yes, and her reasons are mostly about sources. An introductory entry shapes how students first meet a subject, so the reading list attached to it is a political choice as much as a scholarly one. She checks Oxford Bibliographies for current debates, looks at everything in WorldCat in order of publication to see how the field has moved, double-checks every number and place name, and opens Wikipedia only after her own draft is finished, to see what she might have missed.
Her other advice is about form, and anyone who has graded undergraduate papers will recognize it. Stick to chronology, because beginners struggle with change over time. End with consequences, so the reader leaves with a reason to care. And double-check sources, numbers and place names. Most history departments and journals expect Chicago’s notes-and-bibliography system, and if you were trained in MLA or APA the footnote conventions take some getting used to; a Chicago style guide with footnote and bibliography entries side by side is a reasonable place to start. Away from your own reference manager, a free citation generator that handles Chicago as well as APA and MLA saves some typing, though its output still deserves a check against the manual before anything goes to print.
Credit between collaborators
History is mostly written alone, which is why Sutton’s post on co-authorship in the humanities reads like a dispatch from another discipline. She and a co-author spent two weeks at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence analysing early modern Caribbean maps, then finished the article remotely. Her lessons are blunt. The division of labor will change. Somebody will end up doing the job nobody wants, formatting footnotes being her example, and that person deserves explicit credit. If a tool stops working, switch: they used Slack before the trip, then switched to a shared spreadsheet of comma-separated data once they were at the library.
The post also names the thing most collaboration advice skips, which is power. Her co-author was an assistant professor on the tenure clock. She was in an academic-adjacent job with different publishing expectations. Saying that out loud at the start kept the workflow honest and let each of them plan around what the other needed from the article.
Who is obliged to cite whom
The sharpest post in this group is from February 2020: When a White Scholar’s Work is Not Cited. It was written during the argument over the 1619 Project, after prominent historians had criticized it in public. Sutton describes a scene she says she has watched at every history conference: an older scholar stands up during a younger scholar’s talk to point out that his own work went uncited. Her argument is that the demand is rarely neutral: established scholars, she writes, often conflate their contributions with their self-worth and plead for objectivity, which she reads as asking that their own lens be the default one. A younger scholar who declines to center an older one may simply be telling a different story.
You do not have to agree with every line to see why the post belongs next to the Fort Negley ones. Both are about the same question. When the descendants of the fort’s builders tell their family histories on camera, they become sources. When a field’s senior figures insist on being cited, they are asking to remain the sources. Somebody decides whose testimony counts, and the footnote is where that decision becomes visible.
What to take from these six posts
If there is one lesson here, it is that sourcing is a form of respect, and it is owed in several directions. Credit the people who did the groundwork, even if they never published it. Treat the people you interview as the authors of their own stories, with a say in how those stories are used. Choose introductory readings as if they will shape a student’s whole view of a subject, because they might. Split credit fairly with collaborators and say plainly who holds the power. And notice when a demand to be cited is really a demand to stay at the center.
Sutton put the underlying idea most simply in her 2017 nomination post, writing about artifacts rather than footnotes. Nothing makes history sink in like the physical remains of the past, she wrote, which is exactly why people ashamed of a history try to make those remains hard to reach. A good bibliography is one of those remains. It shows the next reader where to dig.
The posts in this essay
- Drafting the First US Nomination to the UNESCO Slave Route Project: Nashville’s Fort NegleyAngela Sutton · September 18, 2017
- Creation & Curation: The Fort Negley Oral History ArchiveAngela Sutton · January 9, 2018
- Double Your Digital ArchiveAngela Sutton · March 4, 2019
- To Write, or Not To Write that Encyclopedia Article?Angela Sutton · April 18, 2017
- Collaborative Writing in the Humanities: Lessons in Co-AuthorshipAngela Sutton · August 27, 2019
- When a White Scholar’s Work is Not Cited: 1619Angela Sutton · February 3, 2020