Hello,
I hope this is okay to ask here but I figured this would be one of the best places because one needs a fair deal of familiarity with the technical aspects of writing about history to answer it.
Scott Lucas, in Divided We Stand: Britain, the U.S., and the Suez Crisis, quotes a document in the Cabinet Committee File archive at the Public Records Office in the UK. He introduces the quote by saying, "The Chiefs of Staff now raised the the subject..." etc.
I would like to use a part of that quote in my essay but I'm struggling on finding good guidance online for citing such a thing.
Lucas' citation reads: PRO, CAB134, E.C. (56) 1st and 2nd meetings, 27-28 July 1956.
Should mine be something as simple as the following? PRO, CAB134, 27-28 July 1956, as quoted in Lucas, 147.
(I have previously cited Lucas' book earlier in the essay.)
Thank you for your help!
It will depend on what citation system you're using. Chicago links the two citations with "quoted in" (see indirect source at the bottom here, h/t Purdue OWL).
Your case, however, is a little more complicated because I'm guessing PRO CAB134 is a reference to an archival source. You'll need to look in the "abbreviations" or bibliography section of Lucas to pull more identifying information. The goal is to give your reader enough information to track down the reference for themselves. It might be as simple as specifying the name of the archive (or writing it out, if PRO is the archive...I have no idea).
Here's some guidelines on how to fully cite archival sources in Chicago, APA, and MLA.
Good luck!