What are footnotes/endnotes?
Footnotes and endnotes are the “old-fashioned” way of citing sources. On college campuses, they are popular in history departments. Rather than include an author’s last name and date of publication at the end of a sentence, the end of a sentence (or longer segment of information) has a number slightly raised from the line of the text. The information on this numbered source is located at the bottom of each page (footnotes) or at the end of the essay, chapter, or book (endnotes). Historians tend to prefer footnotes/endnotes because they allow an author to “go off on a tangent” without interrupting the flow of the text. For example, a historian is writing a paper on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and is brimming with anecdotal information on Pope Leo X. However, although the Leo material might be very interesting to readers, it does not belong in the main body of the paper. Therefore, the writer includes this information in footnotes/endnotes, perhaps even using the footno
