dr. t

I've been turning this idea over in my head a bunch over the past week, since this thread of our discussions began, and I wonder about it. This is not meant to be a pronouncement from on high, and I'd be really interested in responses. Of course a strong department in your subfield is better than a weak one, because a strong department will have the connections to provide you with good opportunities for research and publication within your specialty. Your work will be more polished and of higher quality. When it comes to job letters, however, I'm not sure how much that sort of prestige matters. After all, no matter where you're applying to work, odds are that maybe one person on the search committee is vaguely familiar with your field. You could have been advised by the top person in the study of late Antique Gaul, but that's not going to mean much to the Americanists. Moreover, this would explain why prestige is such an important factor in job placement - in the absence of a deep knowledge of a candidates subfield, a search committee will form impressions based on what it does know: the reputation of the program as a whole. Although the Americanists don't know late Antique Gaul, they know the program is strong and are therefore more well-disposed towards the candidate. Conversely, if a relatively weak program is very strong in one subfield, this would not have much impact on search committee members outside of that subfield. This dynamic would seem to "level" programs and allow for the fairly tight centrality gradient we observe in the network analysis.

I would also say that there are authors like David McCollough write "popular" histories that academics manage not to hate.

No, quality prose and an engaging narrative are what do that. That is exactly what I'm saying. I don't think they achieved anything except for fat royalty checks. I don't agree. I think popularity has more to do with style and density of text. Many popular historical biographies, for example, don't run into the sorts of problems that Diamond's works do. Academics also don't really value good and engaging prose, and they treat writing ability as something that descends from the aether, rather than something you need to practice. Academic historians who practice can write really well. I would cite Peter Lamont Brown as a great example of someone who can write history which appeals to both a general and specialist audience. In other words, the problem with Diamond is not what he's doing, it's that he's bad at it.

So here's my problem: History is a manner of thinking, and the purpose of teaching people who will not become historians history is to train them to think historically. Thinking historically, at least as we conceive it today, is the process of understanding events on the small scale and then, if possible, weaving them together to form broader conclusions. This process requires specialists, but it does not preclude generalists. Generalist history, however, requires a substantial amount of effort to pull off correctly. Being a generalist or writing to a lay audience are not valid excuses for sloppy work. Attempting to approach a subject on a larger scale puts more of a burden on the scholar, not less, because without the solid foundation in microhistory, you can't separate reality from your preconceived biases. If you find a generalist work that you agree with or think is useful which is not so grounded, all that tells you is that the work accords with your own preconceptions. It tells you nothing about the validity of those preconceptions. Popular "historians" such as Diamond do not think historically. They do not write historically. However great their appeal, they are not useful to historians nor should they be encouraged because they are teaching a false approach to history. Diamond in particular promotes an entirely uncritical vision of Western exceptionalism which does much more damage than good. Not all publicity is good publicity.

I suppose it depends on how much debt you have coming into it to really be sure. I know some people take library jobs and stuff, but nothing's guaranteed and you won't be able to barista AND do well, according to the students I had talked to. For my own experience, I was willing to push my debt up to $50k. Fortunately, I didn't have to.

The details of the offer would have some impact (a 4 year TA-ship isn't great), but that seems like a good catch that I wouldn't throw back.

Based on the information given at the visiting students session I attended two years ago, I would not recommend taking on a job while in the MAPSS program. However, with a full tuition package, you're looking at about $15k for a MA from Chicago, which is really actually quite decent and, IMO, worth it.

If you have no PhD options, I would take the MAPSS if they've offered you half tuition or better. AFAIK, they only make like 4 full tuition offers a year, so that is a *very* good result whichever way you cut it.

As someone who did an MA first, I also agree with this. Remember that Yale and Harvard both have many reciprocal agreements with Brown and are pretty near by, so there's still plenty of opportunity to make strong connections.

Your POI should list all the dissertations she or he advised. Plug those names into The Great Google. The department should maintain a similar listing.

You look for the answer of something you want to know and are unable to find it.

It probably means you'll get a MAPSS offer - at least that's how it worked in the past.

Bicycle. No other options to satisfy all the conditions.

Only one modern US. Actually, my status on the portal is still pending, too! They sent the letter via regular email. I get the sense their admissions software isn't the most robust thing around.

I thiiiiiiiink OSU admits are done. I just got the itinerary for visiting weekend from them, and it has a list of all the admits, both the ones who are attending and the ones who said they can't. There may be a waitlist, but I would think they would have said. A total of 21 offers (3 early Americanists, if I remember your field correctly), FWIW, which probably doesn't count some who have already declined.

To quote from my SOP: During a survey course on the high and late Middle Ages, I was given a handout with a variety of medieval quotations about women. The second of these read: “We... recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed... that we will on no account receive any more sisters... but avoid them like poisonous animals.” I was struck not only by the misogyny, but also by the practical implications contained within the passage. It painted a portrait of female sexual depravity which was primitive, animalistic, and universal. Yet I knew that the western Church held that every person possessed free will. How did the quote’s author reconcile these two seemingly disparate truths to himself or to others? This question became a term paper, the term paper became a senior thesis, and down the rabbit hole I went.

In the study in the first post, it ranks 51st between SUNY Buffalo and BU, well outside the top 15% / 21 schools.

The great silence from Toronto continues?

I once asked the DGS at Notre Dame how they valued the writing component of the GRE, as I had gotten a 4.5 and wanted to know if I should retake. His response? "That's the bit that's out of six, right?" Told me everything I needed to know.

"...the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is unable to take favorable action on your application to the Department of History..." ... What.

Do NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES take an apartment with Alpha Management. They are notorious slumlords. Apartment hunting in Boston is hard enough to do in person; I wouldn't think about doing it remotely. Does Northeastern offer any graduate housing, even if it's just for the first semester? Check Padmapper.com - that's where all the last minute deals are.

"But it is not [the author's] fault that the conditions that now govern entry into academic life in the United Kingdom require a first book to be completed in a far shorter period than that in which the implications of a significant insight can be fully thought through." - R.I. Moore, "Review of Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century by L.J. Sackville" in H-France Review 12:44 (2012) "Moore is of course not responsible for the quality of Chiu's and Pegg's work, but he is the person who has chosen to rely on them rather than on good scholars." - Peter Biller, "Review of The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe by R.I. Moore" in Reviews in History (2014)

The day it takes 40 minutes to get from Riverside to Park St. is the day fluffy bunnies rain from heaven and Christ descends down to earth. And even Jesus himself couldn't get the B line from BC to Park in under an hour.

Sometimes, people write very strange things and then somehow get them published. Post them here. "The subtitle of Peter Gay's seminal book on the Enlightenment was, for those who do not recall, "the rise of modern paganism." The full meaning of this, however, was brought home to me only a few years ago when, upon giving birth to our second child, my wife was given the option of taking her placenta home in a plastic bag along with a recipe for soup." - Adam B. Seligman, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 960-961