I'm going to repeat what a lot of people have said. Did you major in history in undergrad? Did you write a thesis? Honestly, if the answer is no to the latter, I would recommend doing an MA first as well. I'm coming straight out of undergrad (graduated '09), having completed a 70 page honors thesis which I defended for High Honors, with a very high GPA, good GRE scores, several awards, strong recommendations, and competency in all three languages I would need for grad school. And I got into one school, out of eight. The odds are extremely rough. And like others have said, fit is EVERYTHING. The two schools I got into and waitlisted at were absolute perfect fits, and I think that's the reason I got noticed there. My research was about as close as you can get to that of my potential advisors at those schools.
You also need to be really, really sure this is what you want to do. Which is why I would recommend an MA, particularly if you have no experience with graduate level classes or executing a large independent research project. There is a HUGE difference between enjoying your undergrad history classes and reading about history, and becoming a professional historian.
That being said, I would recommend checking out Northwestern. I know nothing about your area of study, but I'm attending Northwestern in the fall and I know they have a really strong program in African American and African Diaspora History. Also, they seem to have responded to the recession much, much better than a lot of schools. They still admitted the same number of students as usual (~30), all fully funded for 5 years, and from speaking to people in the department it seems like there is still plenty of money to go around. It seems like funding issues have been the reason so many of us have gotten so many rejections this year.