The Decline and Fall of Bottom Notes, op. cit., loc. cit., and a Century of the Chicago Manual of Style

Abstract

The sometimes-maligned footnote is a hallmark of scholarship. The Chicago Manual of Style has been the historian's standard for 100 years. The function of the footnote remains stable, but style changes. Latinate loc. and op. cit. give way to almost plain English, though ibid. survives. Location and nomenclature change as bottom notes turn to footnotes and then endnotes. Other disciplines turn to internal rather than external citations. This essay links the major changes in citation format over the last 300 years to intellectual taste and technological innovation.

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