Fianna

Wisc-Madison rejections are out. Doesn't look like they bother to send an email. Checked my portal after looking at the status page and it was there.

Heimat - is Kansas a FLAS school? (I should know that...) FLAS stipends are usually pretty good and the rarer the desire to study the language you're asking for funding for, the easier it is to get it.

Both my letter from Kansas and my letter from Illinois were very specific, as was my MA funding letter from UNLV when I was accepted. OSU seems more like an outlier, I think.

I wish Amtrak ran through Vegas. It's insane that a city that exists pretty much solely because of the railroad no longer has consumer rail service. Anyone used PODs to move before? We're thinking of getting a quote from them if we decide to move any of our furniture or just mailing stuff if we don't. Anyone else in the fun position of having to move animals? That's the other big item we need to work out. The dog is driving with us. We're leaning towards flying the cats out. The idea of a 3 day drive with howling cats sounds less than appealing to me.

At least $150. Plus, as I've mentioned elsethread, we're a two-academic household. I can't remember the last beginning of a semester that hasn't meant close to $1500 in Amazon purchases. Not to mention the fiction, the cookbooks, etc. We haven't moved in 12 years, which helps nothing. It's so easy to accumulate things when you've been sedentary for so long.

Not a weirdo at all. I think a lot of the idea of history as political is really spot-on. The act of writing can (I would argue must or should) be a highly political act. Telling stories is a tradition of cultural indoctrination and cultural preservation that has a really long provenance. I feel like being an historian means taking on some of the responsibility for being part of the cultural memory. Shared stories and shared traditions, that sense of shared memory, is a really profound part of what makes a group a people, and the stories we choose to tell and to remember are important ways of making sure that the people behind the stories are told and remembered. To bring this around full-circle to the thread which spawned this discussion, that's why cultural history and the historiographies they spawned are unbelievably valuable.

I dread tallying up the cost of shipping all my books cross-country. I'm planning on pruning a lot of stuff, but it's SO hard for me to get rid of books.

I've always loved the quote from Shakespeare: what's past is prologue. We got here because of all the things that happened in the past. It's important to understand and know that. I love the process of learning about it and writing about it, and eventually teaching it. Learning about the histories of people and areas and countries is pretty amazing. Stumbling upon some awesome thing in an archive that opens a window, however narrow, towards the thoughts or ideas or feelings of someone who lived a long time ago is really cool. Finding the similarities in those old thoughts and feelings and seeing how much similarities there are in the entirety of the human experience gives me an amazing feeling of connection to the world and to human culture.

Methodologies define the way that you work. Traditional history implies (or at least should) a set of methodologies. Social history implies yet another set of methodologies. So does ethno-history, gender history, legal history, etc. All those subfields have methodologies and historiographies which you need to know, whether you want to or not. SOPs should reference the methodological framework that you plan on using or it's not a good SOP, and the description of the project is probably not compelling enough for a committee that isn't intimately familiar with that area of the discipline. I also dispute the idea that simply having the grades to qualify, a good proposal and a willing professor should be enough. One of the biggest problems with the discipline is that it's simply producing too many PhDs for the available jobs in the field. Schools want to place candidates, that's part of their rankings. Students should expect to be placed, or else this is a waste of their time and money. Most PhD students are significantly supported by limited departmental resources, which need to be justified to the institution based on things like placement and rankings. These are all reasons why it's not just about having good grades and a good project are not enough. A project may be fantastic, but not viable. A candidate may have interesting work that isn't widely applicable, which means they're going to have a hard time finding the resources (external funding, grants, post-doc positions, etc) to complete and compete in the market. Departments really do care about those things, and it is part of the business of higher education.

I think it's also worth questioning whether or not students are interested in that type of history. The academic world is a marketplace, like any other marketplace and it's probable that when professors who were teaching those types of classes retired, the department chose to replace them with other types of scholars who attracted students to classes. The freedom of academic thought goes hand in hand with the problem of putting butts in chairs in undergrad classes. This is something I'm working through as I plan my way through my PhD. Legal history is really interesting, and I love it to bits, but I also wrestle with the idea of how that's going to fit me in to the job market in 7 or so years. Many departments have one (and they're often cross-appointed with the law school). But that's still a really narrow market to send my CV out in to, especially in the face of the reality that universities are hiring fewer and fewer professors and job descriptions read very broadly - the goal is to hire someone who does <whatever the position is> but can also teach survey classes, department requirements for undergrads, graduate thematic seminars and interpretive dance. I think things like military history, from the old school of military history, falls in to a similar category.

We had a really interesting debate on this topic in the seminar where we read Guldi and Armitage. It's an... odd book, but it's worth a read as one of the more current "state of the discipline" debates. Their thesis is interesting, and I found a lot to agree with there, but I think their execution and some of their argument was poor. I sort of boiled it down to "economists and political scientists have stolen our cookie and we're sad". But to be fair, it's a lot more complex than that. I work with a lot of social history traditions, looking at the development of race as a legal and non-porous category during colonial and early national America, and one of my goals as a PhD is to broaden that to look at it from a comparative colonial perspective. This, I think, sort of effectively blends me between more "traditional" institutionalist perspectives, but looking at those institutions from a cultural-impact point of view. I like that Guldi and Armitage are calling for a return to more "big history" works, rather than lots of smaller microhistory works with very narrow perspective. There's definitely a space for that, and I would not call for it to go away, but I think the idea of writing histories that speak to broader issues would make history more relevant outside the discipline. There is some interesting stuff in the Manifesto which talks about the ways in which training in the discipline as well as the drain in university budgets and the corresponding tightening of the job market makes the idea of eternally-narrowing expertise something which historians and departments feel they need to do... however, I think a lot of that is changing on its own. Transnational and comparative studies are becoming really "fashionable" again in history, and that's going to open up broader spaces for people to work in.

Have you read Guldi and Armitage The History Manifesto? That's one of their arguments. I think there's some there there to what you are saying, although race is one of my areas. Military history is definitely out of fashion in the discipline currently, because there has been more of a focus on "bottom up" histories, and social history in general, rather than more traditional institutional histories.

Thanks, guys. Kansas is also an overlap with my husband, so we have a choice. It's a nice feeling. Edited to add congrats to the Cornell admit.

Just got notifications from both Kansas and Boulder. In at Kansas, out (as expected) at Boulder.

Congrats on the acceptance, Heimat.

Some excellent advice above, here are my contributions: Try and start going to conferences and listen to how working historians are presenting their work. Use them to network and start meeting people in your area so that you have contacts at programs you may be interested in. Join the societies/groups that work on the areas you're interested in. Most of them have pretty low student dues and publish good journals and host good conferences that focus on the topics. Join Phi Alpha Theta if your school has a chapter and get involved. Definitely go to PAT's national conference, and present there as soon as you can. Submit to their journal as you get in to more advanced classes. Even if you don't get published the first time, you'll get really good feedback on your work.

I wish that I had another semester of time at UNLV to take some of the public history classes. That's certainly something I'd be interested in considering as a career. I've also thought about educational tourism as a way to use my PhD in the event that TT jobs are still as hard to come by when I finish. We've been lucky to be able to fill 3 TT positions here while I've been in the MA program, and the number of vita that came in for each job posting was huge. Sometimes I wonder if I'm insane to do this, but getting this degree was always a dream/goal of mine and I know I'm really lucky to have the chance to do it.

LeventeL, it certainly won't hurt, I don't think. A lot of schools like to see some sort of teaching experience. Also, if you try it and discover that you really don't like teaching, that could help you decide whether you want to do the PhD after all or if you want to think about other ways you can use it, if you don't want to teach. I have a discussion section this semester, partially to figure that out before I committed the next 6 years of my life to chasing the academic dream. We all love to do research, but the reality of academia is that you do more teaching than researching/writing/presenting.

Congrats, Heimat! I saw those go up and thought of you. Great school and a gorgeous area to live in.

Congrats to the Madison admits!

Congrats, tipmar! Great school.

Same here. I was expecting it at this point, so it's nice to just know.

I totally feel the not knowing thing. It's been really frustrating because my husband has heard from 6/7 programs. I've heard from 2/8. He's been accepted at 3, waitlisted at 1, and it would be nice to know if we're going to end up with any more overlapping programs. We'll both be really happy at Illinois, so I'm not really stressing it. But it would be nice to know so that we can plan.

Atlantic world with a focus on race and law. I'm interested in working with Grossberg, Clegg and Snyder. In an absolutely ideal world, I'd love to be able to do a dual JD/PhD. I'm excited about this one. Hopefully my husband will hear from Indiana's political science department with similar good news soon.

Got an email from DGS at Indiana. They're still going through the process of reviewing. The email said that my application was in the top of all the apps they've received and will very likely offer me admission. Email asked me to hold off on committing to anyone else if I am interested and to wait to hear back from them in a few weeks with an official offer and funding information. No word on any visiting weekend. So, if you're waiting for Bloomington, don't give up hope yet. They're officially not done!