HP 332: The Family in US Literature

The Internet Archive contains many issues of the following women's magazines from the 1950s. You can search in the Internet Archive for publications by title (for example "Ladies' Home Journal"). Use the "year published" to narrow down to the time period you are researching. 

The following magazines have most issues from the 1950s in the Internet Archive. Please note that these digitized versions are often black and white scans. The original magazines might have been at least partially in color. 

Johnson Publishing Company, led by John and Eunice Johnson, started publishing Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951. 

Here are some places to start learning more about the history these publications. 

In-Text Citations

As you refer to things found in the magazine in your paper, here is some guidance for in-text citations:

• Include the name of the magazine, the month and year of the issue you are citing, and the page numbers of specific examples.
• For example: 'In the January 1958 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, there is an advertisement that shows.....(5)."
• In the above example, (5) refers to the page number. You could also write this out in your prose, like "In the January 1958 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, there is an advertisement on page 5 that shows..."

Remember, the purpose of citations is to show the journey of your work, give credit to the creators of your sources, and to allow someone reading your paper to locate your sources if they wanted to learn more. 

Works Cited List

If you are referring to various pages throughout the magazine, you can cite the whole issue of the magazine. Cite each separate issue that you use. If there's a volume and issue number given for the issue, include them. For example:

Better Homes and Gardens. Vol. 29, iss. 14, Meredith Publishing Company, Oct. 1951. Internet Archive,https://archive.org/details/sim_better-homes-and-gardens_1951-10_29_14.

Better Homes and Gardens. Meredith Publishing Company, Sept. 1958. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/betterhomesandgardensmagazineseptember1958.

The above citations have (some of) the following MLA Elements:

Title. Vol. #, iss. #, Publisher Name, Month and Year of Publication. Name of Container (where you found this digital copy), Location (in this case, the link). 

If you quote from or refer to a specific article from a magazine, you can include that specific article in your works cited list. This article citation would be formatted like other article-level citations (similar to what you would use for a scholarly journal article.)