History Editing and Proofreading Services

The sentence in the text says that the tenants resented the new steward. The footnote points to a single estate letter from the steward's own agent, written to justify an eviction. That letter is real evidence of something — but not quite of what the sentence claims, and the gap between the two is where historical argument either happens or is quietly skipped.

We edit what historians write — monographs and journal articles, archival research chapters, source criticism and historiographical sections, edited collections and document editions, local and family history, public history and museum text, thesis chapters and grant applications, and reviews and conference papers. Our editors work on the relationship between the claim and the citation.

The footnote is where history is checked, and the failure is a reference that supports something narrower than the sentence above it. A citation is not a gesture at the archive; it is an offer to be verified. We work through these so the claim in the text is scaled to what the cited source can bear, since a single letter written for a purpose evidences that purpose reliably and the state of feeling in a village only weakly; so the nature of the source is characterised where it matters — who produced it, for whom, to what end, and what it had reason to omit; so inference is marked as inference with the words that do that work, because "suggests", "is consistent with" and "shows" are three different claims and readers hold authors to them; so a single instance is not written as a pattern, given that "in at least one case" and "commonly" require different amounts of evidence; so silences are treated as evidence about the record rather than about the past, as absence in an archive usually reflects who kept records; so quantitative statements drawn from partial records state their coverage; and so the footnote gives enough of a reference for another person to find the document, including the repository, collection, piece number and date. Work written this way is trusted by readers who go and look.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, transcriptions and material from private collections. We are editors rather than historians, and we offer no view on interpretation, dating or attribution. What we can do is match each claim to the source underneath it.