LAST EDITED ON Jan-06-02 AT 11:58 AM (ET)If the quotation is exact, it should be enclosed in quotation marks and cited. In historical writing, pretty much everything should be cited BUT your own argument (in history, generally arguments of causation and consequence - history is not a collection of facts but a collection of ARGUMENTS!!!) and well-known facts, such as "George Washington was the first President," or "Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945," etc. You should be able to distinguish an argument from a supporting fact and you should definitely CITE PARAPHRASES of other's arguments. This citation preference in history writing is usually applied in order to help other historians go to those sources, rather than to guard against plagiarism, but there is an element of giving proper credit for historical discoveries and the arguments they produce. It's also, as is all citation, a rhetorical issue of strengthening your argument (making it more credible, making YOU look more learned, making your deployment of facts more forceful, invoking respected authorities to whom your audience is more likely to assent - making your argument more persuasive, in other words).
With the particular quotation used by the AP article, the issue is a little more fuzzy - is it a well-known fact? is it an argument? is it a factual discovery? I would have closed that passage with quotation marks, but I would have also cited the source - even if I had paraphrased it. It's just good practice.
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