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. 

MLA Style gives guidelines for how to cite sources and what to include, but it's important to remember the overall purpose and logic of citations. which can help you effectively and logically identify your sources in your paper.

• 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. 
• You can do a lot of the work of citing your sources in text by just explaining what the source is in your paper. Look at the in-text examples below for some ideas.
• When citing a primary source like these magazines, it's important for the context of your paper that you identify the context of the source, so even though MLA Style doesn't require publication date in the in-text citation, the date of publication is likely relevant information to include in your paper when you describe the source.
• In some cases, there are multiple ways to do something that would all work within MLA Style, and you can decide what works better for your paper. Think about what the simplest way to accurately identify your sources is (within MLA guidelines.)

   

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..."

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 or advertisment from a magazine, you can choose to include that specific item in your works cited list. (If you cite the whole issue, though, you don't have to do this; just note the page the item is on when you refer to it in the text.) This ad or article citation would be formatted like other article-level citations (similar to what you would use for a scholarly journal article.)

There are more examples and general MLA Guidelines on the library's citation guide and in the source itself, the MLA Handbook, which we have online (selected links below) and in print in the library.

Relevent Parts of the MLA Handbook

Citing items with no author or title

Follow these guidelines if you want to cite the specific ad or image in cases where there is not a named author/creator or a title.

Examples

MLA Handbook Plus has examples of works cited page entries for many types of media and situations as well as sample papers written in MLA Style.