dr. t

The area around UMass Boston in Dorchester is OK, as is Quincy. Avoid Mattapan. Only if you have a trust fund.

I keep parsing this word wrong. I was trying to figure out how grad students were un-ionized.

Check that. I was told by the Fulbright officer at my school (which is Harvard, so she has nonzero experience) that I should do a Fulbright if I don't have a firm research plan or apply to PhD programs if I do. Doing both would result in relatively weak applications to each. If you don't need the extra time, save the Fulbright as a way to fund archive research in your 4th year of your PhD.

Most historians (myself included) absolutely hate GG&S, and the critique is a bit more nuanced than you've given. Historians are generally very willing to include non-human factors into the flow of events; see the works of Henri Pirenne for starters, and more recently that of Michael McCormick and Sam White, all of whom have looked at the historical impact of climate. With respect to Diamond, certainly a culture without ready access to iron deposits will look and develop differently than one which has them. This does not, however, mean that culture is more predisposed to conquest, exploration, or domination. The example I most often use in discussing GG&S and the dangers of generalist history is that of what is known to medievalists as the Ullmann-Barraclough debate. Ullmann’s thesis, argued in Growth of Papal Government and elsewhere, is that, from the fall of Rome in 476 to the Council of Trent in 1555, the papacy was driven by the goal of absolute spiritual and temporal hegemony over all of Christendom. Ullmann argued persuasively, and we do indeed see a gradual rise in papal power, first spiritual, then temporal, culminating in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216), after which the papacy overreached itself and began to wane. However, Ullmann is only half the story. His contemporary, Geoffery Barraclough, argued the opposite, that the papacy had no overarching papal plan, and that the papacy acquired its increased powers quite by accident. Both Ullmann and Barraclough took the generalist approach. But in the end, neither Ullmann nor Barraclough was right. In 1979, Jeffery Richards published a book entitled The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages (476-752). By choosing a relatively short timeframe, from the fall of Rome to the final removal of Byzantine power from Italy, and examining the pontificate of each pope in depth, Richards demonstrated that Ullmann was wrong: the papacy had no overarching policy to increase its power, either in the temporal realm or the spiritual. However, Richards also showed that Barraclough was wrong: papal policy was not random, but was governed by the overarching goal. The guiding principle of papal policy was not the increase of its own power, but the resistance to the imposition of any outside authority, first against the Eastern and then the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, through detailed historical study Richards did find a guiding principle, but it was not one that we could see when looking at the larger picture. When looking at Diamond’s rather roughshod treatment of the historical narrative, I was confronted by the question: how much does this matter? After all, despite his errors and strange sources, his overarching narrative felt intuitively correct and useful. Richards, I think, provides the answer: if the broad narrative is not set on a foundation of precise microhistory, we run a serious risk that it is simply the confirmation of our existing biases.

The inherently problematic distinction between different areas of learning - "soft" is unequivocally a pejorative - enters common usage in the mid to late 60s. This is also the time at which women begin making serious inroads into the "soft" sciences. This is not a coincidence.

I'm not entirely sure how this constitutes a contradiction of my statement.

This is itself a warning sign.

The sweet spot seems to be the area around the intersection of School and Somerville Ave. in Somerville, right by the Market Basket. You can find some nice 2BRs in the area for about $2k-$2.2, which isn't that terrible for the market. It's less than a mile to campus and right by a good grocery store and Union Sq.

That's pretty good advice.

I wouldn't disagree. That's why I found it annoying.

I call it "good thing Aquinas dictated to 4 scribes simultaneously because otherwise we'd have no idea what he said".

Try Thomas Aquinas' autograph. Yes, that's the traditional Latin alphabet.

I am tempted to respond with "was this intended for me? I am a medievalist"

"I write to give you an update on your application to the PhD program in History at the University of Toronto. We were EXTREMELY impressed by your application, which combined what many of us thought to be an important and interesting project with an impressive and unique background. It goes without saying that the University of Toronto would be a wonderful place to pursue your research, particularly given our depth and strength in Asian history. As Graduate Coordinator, I read all the PhD applications, so I can say with confidence that your application and proposal really jumped out. Unfortunately, because we are a public university, the Ontario provincial government sets extremely strict limits on the number of international students we can accept each year. This rule forces us to turn away many quite brilliant applicants who we would otherwise love to admit." Uh, liiiiiiiitle problem. So much for a personalized email. (Waitlisted, btw)

You should be in a pretty decent position to take advantage of the MA, then. I'd say yes.

A 1 year MA at UChicago (for example) costs US$45,000 plus room and board. 'Murica.

You say learn Latin - do you not even have an introductory course already? Do you have either of the two usual scholarly languages (German, French) required for medieval history? Not having any Latin would be a major red flag, and not an easy deficit to overcome in a 1 year MA. If you do not have *any* of the three, I would take the time to acquire them and take the MA in a few years time. Language ability is to my mind the central skill required of any medievalist. You can apply during your first year, but I wouldn't expect that application to be any more successful than your current ones. I would plan my major push for the year after (or even the year after that). Deliberately construct your thesis with an eye towards your writing sample, remembering that a writing sample will be shorter than your thesis. Make sure your thesis uses primary source texts. Make an article (ca. 8k words) out of your thesis and submit it to journals ASAP. If you do this by July after graduation, you should have reviewer feedback before applications are due, which will greatly strengthen your sample. Have a realistic outlook of how long you will need to learn what you need to know.

If you're spending the money for Oxbridge, I would start planning your year very carefully now to ensure that you have a strong PhD application on the other side.

See also: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=storrowed

Still, MA programs are hard places to pick up and master a language. It's best to have the preliminary skills already.

Crunching some numbers, 63 schools deviate more than 10 places from both the USN 2009 and NRC2010 rankings The top 10 are: Study USN2009 NRC2010 institution 43 101 121 Catholic University of America 119 85 22 University of South Carolina 118 71 42 Purdue University 94 28 52 CUNY Graduate Center 74 124 124 Drew University 112 92 35 Northeastern University 142 64 124 George Mason University 32 71 87 State University of New York, Stony Brook 89 71 14 Arizona State University 140 124 67 University of Memphis Catholic and SUNY-Stony Brook are severely under-ranked by the conventional metric, the others are substantially over-ranked.

24 12 8 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 48 36 11 University of Notre Dame 49 33 13 Rice University 119 85 22 University of South Carolina 45 36 24 Carnegie Mellon University 53 26 31 Vanderbilt University 17 28 40 UC Davis 57 24 40 Ohio State University 122 85 82 Texas A&M Just an eyeball

Actually, what's really interesting is how much the results from the study differ from "conventional wisdom" reports. Here's the ranking list by centrality from the report (for history): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5p5Vo_V4WG_UWJwTld2bVF0dlU/view?usp=sharing

Here is a response I made to a similar question earlier this cycle: It remains true for you. However, it is not strictly necessary for you to go overseas to do what you want, as there are several strong US programs in the field. This is particularly important since the British PhD is vastly different from the American one. As to if you're good enough? Only one way to find out.