War Against the weak utilized published and
private sources spanning a
century, and in several languages, and as such presented numerous
textual
challenges. We relied upon established style conventions as often as
possible, and, when required, adapted and innovated styles. Readers
may
notice certain inconsistencies. Some explanation follows.
Every phrase of quoted material has remained as true as possible to
the
original terminology, punctuation and capitalization, even to the
point of
preserving archaic and sometimes offensive terms when used by the
original
source. No attempt was made to filter out ethnic denigrations when
they appeared in period materials. Eugenicists in America called
themselves
eugenicists, but in Britain referred to themselves as eugenists, and
sometimes the usage crossed; we used eugenicists in narrative but
eugenists
whenever it appeared in a specific quotation. In several instances
we quoted
from profoundly misspelled handwritten letters, and it was our
decision to
transcribe these as authentically as possible.
When referring to materials originally published in German, journals
and magazines are cited by their legal name in German, such as
Archiv fUr
Rossen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, with the first usage including a
translation
in parentheses. Titles of books are referred to by their English
translations;
the first usage includes the original German title in parentheses.
When
multiple translations of a book title or organization name exist, we
selected
the most appropriate. We made an exception when a book's title rose
to the
public awareness of a Mein Kampf We used the German fUr whenever
possible
but were compelled to use the variant fuer when it was used in
American headlines.
For most points of style, this book has followed The Chicago Manual
of
Style. Unfortunately, not even the near-thousand pages of standards
set
forth in Chicago could cover all the varied forms in which primary
information
was received. This is especially true when dealing with electronic
sources such as Internet web pages, and actual documents-new and
oldreproduced
in PDF formats, electronic books and other Internet sources.
This is one of the first history books to incorporate widespread use
of legitimate
materials on the Internet. For example, we obtained copies of Papal
encyclicals from the Vatican's website, PDFs of original historical
programs,
and electronic books-all on the Internet. These are legitimate
materials when used with extreme caution.
Citing the Internet is a profound challenge. Given the lack of style
consensus,
and the fact that websites are continuously updated and rearranged,
it was necessary to create a new style for Internet citations. We
decided to
include just two key elements: the website's home page address and
the title
of the document. General search engines such as Google and
site-specific
search engines will be the best means of locating the content of
these cited
pages. Naturally we retained printouts of all cited web materials.
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