psstein

Good post and one that really bears repeating. Leaving with the MA was one of the best decisions I've ever made.  And for the record, I see the "alt-ac" thing as a crock. With a few exceptions, "alt-ac" jobs are jobs you can hold with a PhD, not jobs requiring a PhD. I'm sorry, but your dissertation on discourses on bodily fluids in the 18th century or the literary culture of immigrants in the early 20th century isn't a key element of becoming an insurance adjuster or a grants manager. These are jobs you can hold with the PhD.
By the way, if I sound angry about this, it's because I am. American graduate education is rotten from the core. The "alt-ac" push is, in part, a way to justify the cost (financial and opportunity) of students who complete a PhD and cannot find permanent academic employment.
If it's at all possible, mods, please, sticky this thread. Every prospective graduate student needs to read this post.
 

The following passages are what I found especially controversial. 
IMO, when you attempt to take away a person's opportunity to fail, you also take away an opportunity to succeed. Also, the way I was trained as an educator, you do not mess around with or question others' motivation unless they specifically ask for guidance. Had @NoirFemme written that those who dream of being a history professor may find the path exceptionally challenging, or suggested that such individuals consider the benefits of broadening their constellation of motivational factors, I would have nodded in silent agreement.
But that's not what she wrote. Instead, she editorialized ("the height of conceit").
But also.. 
^The position that one's background alone bequeaths an understanding of how doctoral programs are designed, is debatable, especially given the absence of qualifiers. IME, it is the kind of generalization that historians are trained not to make -- autobiography is not history. One's background and experiences may provide additional insight, but do not, in and of themselves provide expertise.

Had @NoirFemme summarized her experiences as being consistent with what is being reported in this and other threads--with or without the disclosure of race, gender identity, and socio economic class, I would find her comments more memorable and less controversial.
You continue to conflate your individual experience as a graduate student in one history program as a global view of all doctoral programs as well as of thousands of higher education institutions. The latter is especially interesting as individual institutions are themselves trying to figure out if COVID-19 is the cause of their financial misfortunes or, as many administrators and consultancies are arguing, an accelerant. "Being honest" about one's experiences is crucial,  and, IMO, a conversation among historians is not well served by over generalizing and over simplifying cause effect relationships.

Positioning oneself in a role is not the same as fulfilling that role. You sought to establish an order by which people should consider applying to history graduate programs. For whose benefit did you offer the opinion? Certainly not for the benefit of "true believers" who might be able to submit application materials that resonate with like-minded professors who go on to do what history professors are known to do -- lean in and support graduate students who remind them of themselves. 

This is an important thread and one of the most insightful ones I've read in years here. 
I'll second @Sigaba's comment of not wanting to opine on people's professional goals. I think those fluctuate a lot, and this forum is only a slice of the history community. 
I want to be clear about something. There are no jobs. This is not grim or sad, it's the reality and the hand we are dealt with. In my field, there are two. I could go into the weeds of how this is ridiculous as higher education costs continue to increase, but we won't solve here. 
If you want to do a PhD in history, then accept that you will not probably get a TT job. Further, if you want to do a PhD in history, do not attend a program that is only geared towards the academy.
More programs now are expanding their objectives and preparing students to other careers. We could discuss if that should be the aim of a doctorate, but for argument's sake, let's say it can be done. This is what @TMP referred to as their grant writing skills. Programs today offer certificates in digital humanities or public history, and many graduates end up working in these fields.
For those of you asking of professions outside the professoriate, here is where friends of mine are working: librarians at research libraries, preparatory schools (they pay as good as a TT prof!), digital scholarship coordinators, advanced education directors, writing center directors, archivist (I don't remember exactly the job, but he is working for a federal archive in programming). A friend of mine with a Theology degree went on to work for sports rep agency. I'm not saying you should do a PhD for any of these positions.
But, alas, basically, weigh everything in, and remember the costs of doing a PhD that are not advertised in the website. 
 
 

To your last point, yes. Part of the withdrawal of history into ever-increasingly narrow and specialized niches has had the effect of making historical scholarship arcane, inaccessible, and generally not too useful to people outside of academia. That's not a criticism of any specialized field, for the record. I actually find some of that work fascinating (e.g. Andrew Warwick's work on mathematical physics education at Cambridge). But, speaking from my history of science/medicine perch, my subdiscipline has actively disengaged from its original mission and attempted to become more integrated with the historical community writ large.
It is extremely common now to see monographs with practically no engagement of the serious scientific issues at hand, especially in history of medicine. I'm not against the social turn at all; it was a good thing and it needed to happen. With that said, the issue is now that the field doesn't actually engage scientists. Instead, it turns its attention towards historians (and other humanities disciplines) that want to know something about the science.
Put more bluntly, a microhistory about the ontology of bodily fluids in 17th century Spain doesn't draw much interest outside of a very narrow crowd of academics.

Yes, unfortunately. Having just gotten off an interview with a consulting firm, they're also getting hammered. Plus, I wouldn't overestimate the value of a PhD to them, at least based on people I've spoken to in them. FWIW, of course.
@Sigaba makes an excellent point. The private sector is bad right now. The public sector is teetering on an apocalypse. Many states have had irresponsible or outright incompetent budget management for years. With COVID-19, the day of financial reckoning draws nigh.

A good dissertation makes a coherent contribution to a historiography. A great dissertation explains why those who don't have any interest in its particulars should read it. 
That is, yes, in some ways academia is all about counting angels on pinheads, and it always has been. But whether that's all it is rests very much on your own shoulders as a writer and a communicator. 
As unlikely as it is to get an academic job these days, it is even more unlikely if you cannot communicate to a broader audience why your work matters. If you can't think about what you do on that higher level, you will also have difficulty marketing your skills outside of academia. 

I have never personally regretted having gotten my PhD in history; it enabled me to have so many experiences I would never have had otherwise, to live abroad, to make wonderful friends, live the life of the mind, etc. I'd be a very different person if I had stayed in the job I worked in before applying to PhD programs; the experience of the PhD helped me grow so much and I would never take it back.
But, I want to second a lot of what the OP said.
There really are so few jobs. When I was first applying to PhD programs in 2011 I knew that the job market was bad, but like OP said, I didn't really understand how bad and how much worse it was going to get. Everyone should look at this:
 
It could well be that there will be far fewer jobs in the next few years than there have been this last decade.
In recent years history has lost more majors than any other discipline. See here https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/27/new-analysis-history-major-data-says-field-new-low-can-it-be-saved Admins seeing fewer majors and lower enrollments require fewer history classes, which means they need fewer history profs, so retirees are not replaced and job adverts are rare.
The situation is worse than a "bad" job market. There have been more than 1,000 History PhDs awarded per year every year for the last decade even though the number of TT jobs for assistant professors is far, far lower. The numbers are just horrible. In popular fields (American and European) you do literally compete against hundreds of other people - including frequently, nearly all of your professional friends unless they are significantly older or younger than you. The experience of applying for these jobs is extremely time-consuming, brutally stressful and heartbreaking.
When I was applying I had this idea that I would come to the end of my PhD and there would be this sort of, referendum moment - either I would get a job or I would not and if I did not, I would move on and do something else with my life. But this is not how it works in reality. One of my advisors told me it often takes people three years on the market to get a job, if they do at all, and frequently in those three years they have to hustle to find temporary positions year to year, whether its extending their PhD, a postdoc, a VAP, adjuncting, "self-funding" (if you're rich), or one of those paper positions where you get affiliation but no salary (again, if you're rich). The reality is that in the final years of this process you often have to continuously make decisions about how much you are willing to sacrifice in pursuit of the dream of a TT job. You may have to weigh whether it's better to work on more publications or take a side job, if you should take an onerous adjucting teaching load that may leave you no time for research or writing good job applications, if it is worth it to uproot your life and move (at your own expense) across the country for a one year position (a bigger challenge for anyone with a partner or spouse). Living with not knowing what you will be doing the next year, and having to weigh these decisions can be very stressful. And, you may feel when you begin a PhD that you would be willing to move anywhere, take any job, do anything, sacrifice anything, in pursuit of the dream, but you cannot necessarily anticipate how those sacrifices will feel when you are older (especially if you have a partner or children).
I want to echo what the OP said about how a PhD comes as a enormous cost, even if it's fully funded, because the true cost is time. Yes, if you get into a good program you may be making a guaranteed 30k (though, to be honest, in many cases less) with health insurance for five to seven years. There is something to that, yes. But being a grad student freezes you at entry level, both financially and socially (as you are always in a junior, subordinate position in the career) for somewhere between 5-10 years. Your salary will likely not increase over your time in the PhD, or if it does, it will do so only minimally. Often, it will not keep up with inflation or rising cost of living, especially if your program is in an expensive city so you will actually be able to live less well in your final PhD years than at the beginning. What seems to you like a generous, comfortable salary when you are 22 or 24 may feel frustratingly or embarrassingly low when you are 30 and your friends from college are starting to make good salaries, get married, have children, and buy houses. You will still be making the same money you made when you entered your PhD.
You need to consider the opportunity cost. The true cost is everything else you could have been doing and earning during the time you were getting your PhD if you weren't doing the PhD. In all that time you spent being a grad student and making what is a 22-years-olds entry-level wage you lose all the time you could have been investing into another career path, in which you could have been moving up, getting raises and promotions, saving for retirement and getting that sweet compounding interest. If you do go on to get a TT job, your time spent in your fully-funded PhD will have been an investment, but if in the end you transition into another field you may be starting over at square one and you will have lost the opportunity for all those other gains forever. 
There are enormous benefits to getting a PhD in history. The work of a history grad student is fun, intellectually stimulating, fulfilling, and prestigious. You usually get a flexible schedule, meet interesting amazing people, travel, etc. But you pay an enormous price - financially in lost time and opportunity, and too often with damage to your mental health. Things worked out very well for me personally and I don't regret my PhD at all. But I know for sure that even though I thought I knew all about how the job market was bad, I did not really understand what the true costs would be when I signed up for this path.
 
 
 
 

Even though I was told by a professor that I might have gotten a job had I been born a decade earlier--"maybe"--I would never advise someone not to pursue a personal or professional goal. (The day I passed quals, the committee member who represented my outside field said Think of yourself as a teacher. By which he meant that it was my responsibility to give people information that enabled them to achieve their goals--my opinion of those goals notwithstanding.)
I would (and have) recommended doing a herculean amount of due diligence--including reading the OP again and again. There may be "nothing new" to some readers who are aware of some of the patterns that have been developing since the early 1990s. To many others, the post adds crucial nuance.
 I also recommend setting up job alerts in Linkedin and elsewhere so one understands how graduate degrees may or may not translate into requirements for job qualifications and professional experience. Some consultancies and government agencies require the kind of research experience that cannot quite be satisfied by a master's degree.
FWIW/Neither here nor there, I do take slight exception to the lumping together of the academic job market for professional academic historians as the most important key performance indicator of the profession's vitality or sustainability. 

Years ago I frequented Gradcafe while applying for a PhD in history. Not all of the advice I received here was good, but much of it was. Partly as a result of that advice, I was admitted to a good PhD program where I had excellent mentors, made some dear friends, and learned a great deal about the craft of writing history. Everyone battles depression at some point while doing a PhD, but on the whole I remember my PhD with fondness. So hear I am with my PhD in hand, ready to pay it forward. This is the best advice I can give you: don't do a PhD in history. Don't do it.
I know that you have heard about how bad the job market is, but "bad" is misleading. It suggests that it is highly competitive, in a slump, leaving some good people behind, or something like that. The reality is that the historical profession is dying. There are no jobs and there won't be any for a long time. By that I don't mean that there are few jobs. I mean that there are none. My field is a large one. Every big history department in America has at least one scholar in my area. And this year there is not a single job that I'm eligible to apply for. If you complete a PhD, you need to realize that there is a good chance that you'll be in the same boat. And if there are two or three jobs when you finish, you'll be competing against hundreds of other scholars desperate for work. Many of your competitors will be 5-7 years out of their own PhDs, have books with good presses, and years of teaching experience. Even if you show enormous promise, why would risk-averse departments hire you instead of someone who has been doing the job well for years?
I attended a top-five PhD program (overall and in my field). I wrote an award-winning dissertation. I graduated with multiple good publications. I received excellent course evaluations for the courses I TA'ed and taught as instructor of record. My mentors wrote fulsome letters of recommendation. I produced polished job application materials. I did a postdoc at another top-five university. I am a friendly person who interviews well. None of those things altered the brute fact that there were no jobs. My profile isn't that of a superstar, but it is the profile of someone who did everything you're supposed to do. 
I'm not bitter about my experience. I have an academic adjacent job that is in some ways better than a tenure-track job. I don't really regret doing a PhD, but I am keenly aware that it came at an enormous cost. If you're on this board, you've heard the rule now that you should never pay for a graduate degree in history. That's true, but the real cost of doing a PhD is time. Everyone pays for their PhD. Even if you are among the vanishingly small number of prospective historians who get a tenure-track job, it will probably take seven years of a PhD work and then several years of struggling in temporary employment. That's probably a decade of your life receiving highly specialized training for a job that doesn't really exist anymore. You will pour most of your youth into a discipline that almost certainly won't have a place for you. 
What should you do? If you are thinking about applying for a PhD in history, don't. If you can't imagine doing something else, work on strengthening your imagination. There are lots of ways to engage in the life of the mind outside of the university. If you are in the first few years of a PhD program, I would recommend getting an M.A. and getting out. If you are close to the end of your program, it might make sense to hang on and finish. But you should write a good-enough dissertation and spend most of your time figuring out how to build a path toward a non-academic future.
Again, I'm not angry or bitter. I had a good experience in my PhD experience and will continue to publish some. But the historical profession is dying. History enrollments have fallen more than enrollments in any other discipline. Administrators are cutting lines or even eliminating departments. It probably won't get better for a generation, if ever. 

Indeed... just because Germany was immediately demilitarized after it collaborated with the Ottomans during the Great War (including witnessing the genocide), Germany had other ways of maintaining ties with Turkey and that's where "soft" power comes in. Make sure you're asking questions that are interesting to you drawing from what you've been learning. No one needs to know more than a sentence or two about a book that was influential to you.  I'd just want one line and if I was particularly interested, I'd look it up myself but in general, readers in your field will *know* about a lot of scholarship that has been published, even if only cursory. They are the ones who are going to make the case for your admissions to the general committee if they want you.

Generally, no. If a program does not offer full tuition remission and stipend support upon acceptance, it is not a program worth attending. 

I've seen and received so much wonderful help here over the past few months. Huge shoutout to @pssteinwho offered insight on one particular program, @TMPwho helped me in navigating the application process generally, and @APwho was kind enough to offer me feedback on my SoP.
 
I'm just about done with all of my application materials. I'm making last minute revisions to my SoP (on top of those @APsuggested), particularly the section(s) that deal with my research interests and research questions. The Berkeley example is phenomenal and yet the writer was utilizing her past experience researching the same topic and rolling that into her SoP. My circumstance is not quite the same, so I was wondering if anyone would be willing to offer some additional feedback.
 
In particular, I'm curious whether or not my two paragraphs are redundant or if they're useful in explaining and contextualizing my interest and questions. Getting an Americanists insight on my questions would be incredibly helpful, too. Last piece before submissions! Thanks!

These are some very interesting questions. I don't think Wisconsin's faculty would be the worst match for those interests, but one of them is likely to retire shortly and the options outside of her may not be the best for your interests. I also believe the program there has some structural problems that I'd caution thinking carefully about before applying.
There's an excellent essay in Francisco Scarano (ed.) Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State discussing the US South's role as a "tropical other." Natalie Ring's The Problem South and Todd Savitt and James Harvey Young (eds.) Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South. Finally, William Coleman's Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology.
 
 

Don't start your SoP this way -- decenter yourself. I do not know how many times ppl have to stress that an SoP is about demonstrating that you can ask robust, interesting, historical questions. Do that. Start with the questions. Do NOT begin with a bunch of vague stuff about how you identify, what you might be interested in working on, even what your senior thesis was -- professors are not going to read "I am open to a variety of topics" and think "well that's the kind of exciting work I want to be involved with". Sorry to be blunt but it needs to be said. In order to get into a program you need to write a very clear, very strong SoP. It might help to just write down (in very clear, plain English, without any frills) exactly what it is that you are hoping to ask in grad school (in coursework, research, and maybe, eventually your dissertation). A quasi-prospectus is not going to impress professors -- your project will change (and needs to) and that's the point of coursework and early years spent in conversations with profs. 

**If you DM me I will send you my SoP from 2017. I'm not sure you've seen enough examples and that might help. 

@Strider_2931 definitely Wailoo, but I'm also thinking of Barnes as a cultural historian, as well as Wirzbicki and Wilentz.
The history and HOS programs at Princeton have separate application processes, but they are pretty tightly connected, so you can work with people on both sides. If that interests you, you might consider reaching out to Wailoo and see if he seems interested.
FWIW, I sort of fell into HOS, without a deep background. That's definitely the less common path, as far as I can tell, but it does happen.

No, you are not a failure for leaving academia or questioning your future in academia. The "non-academic = failure" thought process and belief system needs to be burned to the ground and the earth underneath salted. In today's academic job market, many people with excellent pedigrees and award-winning books have trouble finding non-contingent academic employment. Many of them leave academia. They are not failures. 
I did the exact same thing in full knowledge that a) I didn't want to spend more time in my program, b) the "alt-ac" thing is a total fucking farce, and c) I had grown to hate my particular field, plus the one I had the most interest in is practically dead. I don't consider myself a failure. I think leaving my program after the MA was one of the best things I've ever done.
If you really love teaching, perhaps you should see what your state's (e.g. PA) educational license requirements look like.
 

Enjoying the differences in available prefixes for LoR writers at Grad-school application sites. Harvard Divinity: ''Mother'', ''Honorable'', ''Reverend Doctor''. Georgetown History: ''Lieutenant Colonel'', ''Ensign'', ''Midshipman''. 

I don't know of anyone who has gotten the GRFP, but I do know several people in my program have picked up dissertation research awards from the NSF under their Science and Technology Studies division.
My very rudimentary impression is that any NSF-funded project has to shed light on a scientific discipline, or if you do history of medicine, medical science. I know I looked into applying for some NSF money once, but it wasn't a great fit, even though I study health care— my project was/is more focused on things like hospital operations and staffing shortages, not how patients responded to medical treatments, how medical technologies were developed/used in hospital contexts, the social history of medical disciplines like cardiology, psychiatry, obstetrics, etc.
I'd recommend searching through the NSF website to see what kinds of projects have been funded, too.

It's not encouraging. Schools who have looked at the current situation and decided to take more graduate students either 
1) Have little connection to reality,
2) Can't function without grad student labor, or
3) Both.

The craft has almost always has favored those who could afford to think about the past and to gather primary source materials and to purchase secondary works.
Now, I think technology levels the field a bit, but this opinion is provincial. As an Americanist, I'm floored by the ever-expanding range of digitized government documents and archival sources freely available to all. The financial hurdles for access to journals are manageable. 
From a computing standpoint, memory, processing power, and software are inexpensive "force multipliers." 
The internet makes access to "how to" knowledge a bit more democratic as well.
To be clear, my comments should not be taken as advocacy for the "pull yourself up by your boot straps" mentality that wrongly reduces good fortune, random chance, and misfortune to a lack of motivation. I'm attempting to encourage aspiring graduate students to think of ways to use available resources creatively and ambitiously. Flexibility may also prove crucial -- a writing sample that makes use of what's available may prove more beneficial in the short run than one that suffers from lack of primary sources even though it's closer to one's research interests.

This, of course, favors the already-privileged. 

To quote: In 95% of academic situations, the appropriate response is shutting the fuck up. For the other 5%, it is "that's an interesting idea; I'll have to think about it."

The deployment of strategic nuclear weapons is unlikely in the next twenty years. The United States most likely foes in a general war (Russia and the PRC) do not have the technical means to degrade the American armed services' second strike capabilities with the first wave of missiles. (In a nutshell for a first strike to work, the attacker's warheads have to hit all of their targets at the same time --because the impact of the resulting EMPs is unknown-- with a circular error probable sufficient enough to ensure that the target is destroyed. This task is complicated by the assumed need to put two warheads on each target.)
When I started graduate school, I had a professor who, incidentally, specialized in the colonial/ early national period, mockingly asked me more than once "Why would anyone study naval history?" Well, this is why.
If your current program offers a thesis or report option, consider the benefits and challenges of taking either option relative to an option that does not require you to write tens of thousands of words long.
Identify primary sources that have been digitized and are either publicly accessible or available through an institutional affiliation. Get a good understanding of what's available and then start thinking about how you could use those materials to write a dissertation. 
Start figuring out if you want to explore ways to meld your expertise in anthropology into your practice of academic history. If the answer is "yes" start reading secondary works that will help you craft your intellectual identity.
Identify, obtain, and read "state of the art" historiographical essays in your field. From this exploration, you should be able to identify a handful (or two) of must read books. There are many threads in this forum on how to read like a graduate student in history but for works that "one ignores at one's peril," you're going to want to read every word.
Work on your language skills while also doing what you can to figure out how stringent the proficiency exams may be.
Identify departments where your interests align with several faculty members. It's not how a department fits you, it's how you will fit into a department. Identify professors who may sit on your committees and then start reading their works. When you narrow in on preferred committee chairs, give some thought to reading everything you can get your hands on -- including theses and dissertations. There are a few threads in this forum and in others on what to look for in an advisor, horror stories of things going side ways, and recommendations. Unfortunately, the CHE fora are gone and so the valuable information in the legendary STFU thread are lost to antiquity. (The short version is, when in doubt, STFU. When you're 100% absolutely sure, STFU. Anywhere else, give STFU a try.)
But also, given the state of the Ivory Tower, the supremacy of anti-intellectualism, and the ongoing crisis of professional academic history, it's never too soon to start sketching out alternatives. Now, I don't recommend that you let anyone know who has decision making authority know that you have such plans because true believers expect true belief out of others. But alternative plans can help you figure out how to pick an outside field and how to identify skills you can develop that are transferable to the private sector. (Hint: data analysis and visualization that cannot be replicated by AI or ASI; project management; and...HR)

Are you able to collaborate with faculty in another department?  I would never suggest anyone stick with an advisor that is inactive in research.  Mine decided to quit doing research right after I arrived, so I established opportunities in other departments and quit wasting my time on pointless lab meetings.

An environment which is toxic for some is perfect for others. It depends on you.