Riotbeard

The fact that you are even debating this is crazy (I mean this in a nice way:) ). UCLA and Harvard are comparable programs. One is giving you a fellowship to a PhD program and the other is not. Go to the dance with girl or boy who asks you. Living in Cambridge is very expensive so even a tuition waver means considerable debt compared to no debt at UCLA and finishing your PhD at a younger age. There is literally no upside to going to unfunded Harvard over UCLA. Imagine two years from now Harvard and Yale have rejected you and then UCLA rejects you because you already turned them down. There is no real difference between the number 4 and number 1 program in your expertise in terms of prestige. The only person turning down UCLA would benefit is next person on the waitlist.

I had a similar issue my first set of applications, and turned down the unfunded PhD and waited another year. I found one of those GRE classes really helpful in raising my verbal score from something just ok to 96%. I would say even 80% is not that high for verbal, when a lot of other people will be in the 90s. I got into a bunch of places my second time around, so I would definitely not advise paying for an MA.

One thing you can learn from these recruitment events is at least a general sense of funding. I went to two, and while I loved both programs, I was hugely influenced by the fact that Tulane paid for my airfare and hotel. While I liked the other school a lot, they only reimbursed to the tune of less than $200. To me it felt indicative of how flush with cash the department was, and later opportunities for funding (like travel, pay increases, etc.). They are important things. Even the best paid grad students aren't paid well, but even a little bit more cash, can be the difference between research travel without getting tons of grants, etc.

What are the differences in funding? At UGA, is most of your funding based on TA'ships? At Emory, is most of your funding non-service based? Non-service based funding can be a huge deal, especially once you are ABD.

I know Duke has a strong theoretical bent in their history program, but they (and pretty much no history departments) view themselves as training theorists. The history of consciousness program is a decent recommendation, but I have heard they have lost some their theoretical diversity since their peak with Hayden White. You might want to look more toward Literature departments with strong new historicist faculty. I would imagine these programs would be more sympathetic to a more theory heavy approach to history. A lot of new historicists work primarily with documents that would traditionally be of the purview of historians, but ask very different types of questions. Also, area studies depending on the department could be a great fit.

I have a couple of tips. Depending on the type of documents you are using, spreadsheets can be a great device, because they allow for great search-ability and sorting documents in potentially interesting ways. I use word documents and spreadsheets. I personally don't like a lot of the notetaking software, but that is me. Back up in the cloud and with a harddrive. I lost twenty pages of notes when my hard-drive crashed a week in. Luckily I still had the photos, and was able to go back and retake my notes. I would suggest behaving/dressing professionally. You have to get archivists on your side, so first impressions do matter. In addition to them helping you find great sources (and sometimes one that you weren't even looking for), archivists can be your introduction into the local academic community, and can be great advocates of your work. You have to be efficient with your time, but I tended to go to the archive when they opened and leave 15 minutes before they close. Start packing up around fifteen minutes before they close. Don't keep the archivists at work late! View your time in the field like your time at a conference. This is a great opportunity to build your professional network. Go to talks. E-mail professors in the local departments. Ask them for an opportunity to pick their brain, and introduce you to some of their grad students. This is great for professional reasons, but also can help alleviate the inherent loneliness you will have battle moving into a new city every month or two. My research year I went to 8 different cities. When I went back for follow up research, it was so exciting that I got to see all my friends. If the archive has a sign in sheet, see who else is there doing research. Go up to big name professor x from Yale, and ask them what they are looking at. Ask them if they have time that week for lunch and if you can pick their brain. I did this, and that person continues to give me great advice, and at our big conference, we meet every year for coffee, etc.

Congrats, and ditto, haha. That was a quick finish Kotov!

I meant you in the general sense. I think it's easy to be cynical in a field with a lot of negatives, but I am increasingly unconvinced that it's useful to think too much about this information, unless you are advising someone who does not like history all that much. I tend to preach positivity to the first and second years in my department. Not to be deluded about the reality, but ultimately a positive attitude will help someone more in the long run than being angry and cynical. If this is someone's dream job, it's better to fail trying than the alternative of giving up and you might as well enjoy the time you get in the profession even if that is just graduate school.

Thanks! It was exciting news, although tempered by of course the one reviewer of four that hated it.

We all know this! My girlfriend is a professor (at another school), and has been on a bunch of search committees and the reasons for rejection are complicated and from outside seem often outrageous. At one prestigious school, for example, where she was a postdoc, they threw out all candidates who they thought might apply for tenure early, because of money issues. Likewise, where she is now they look for people who they expect to stay so they don't go for top candidates. All of that being said, this cynicism will not help you. Do you want to be the bitter person at every conference that nobody likes? What's the point of being so doom and gloom? Will focusing on this knowledge ultimately help you get a job? It is better to keep this in the back of your mind as a reality, but there is no need to let it control you consciousness. I am in my sixth year, (defending Spring 2017, what-what!), and I can see the damage this attitude does to people throughout grad school. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and a reason not to try, and to become generally unpleasant. You have to have optimism in order to keep plugging away. For example, I sent in an article this summer to the top journal in my subfield, with the knowledge that it would most likely get rejected, but figured that I already knew the worst could happen. Happy ending, I got a revise and resubmit, and it will hopefully be accepted by the time I am on the market! If you get too negative, you can limit the field of possibilities for yourself, and it will ultimately only hurt you. The job market doesn't care about you, so you should not care so much about it. It's out of our control and unlikely to change.

I would echo this! Of course, people with post-docs may have some advantages, but people do get TT jobs as ABD students, even though it is rare. I know a couple people who got TT jobs as ABD students. If you don't apply, you don't won't get it. Also every application is practice for the next one.

I think there are a lot of potential new directions for U.S. History research. In addition to transnational history that was already mentioned, there is a lot of new research and interpretive avenues in the history of the environment, science, and medicine. I think there are sub-fields in U.S. history that are heavily saturated, but there are plenty alternative questions to be asked. Likewise, databases provide for new types of analysis and access that weren't possible even twenty years ago. Key word searches of newspaper databases allow for you consult a breadth of possible sources not possible before. In my own research, I have been able to show that one guy who was considered as a regional figure actually had a large national and even international following (this was intentionally vague...).

That's kind of a loaded question as it's a huge field. Atlantic was my second field in exams, and my project has significant Atlantic dimensions, but the field is pretty old at this point. If you are talking Anglo-Atlantic, the key early works include Jack Greene Pursuits of Happiness, Bernard Bailyn The Peopling of British North America, and Volume 1 of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America. I mean really some the earliest Atlanticist are people like Eric Williams, Phillip Curtain, and Alfred Crosby. A lot of the base ideas that make up the foundation of the field come out of Braudel's The Mediterranian. In terms of the "difficulty" of embarking on an Atlantic project, it really depends. A lot of Atlanticist work on specific areas and show their relations to wider Atlantic communities, these are normal and very doable. A useful starting point would be Jack Greene and Phillip Morgan's edited reader Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. This has field essays on the each sub-discipline (i.e. French Atlantic, Spanish Atlantic, Black Atlantic, etc.) by really important scholars. Atlantic history doesn't have to be writing the history of the "Inland Sea", so much as showing how one place is apart of larger networks of exchange (This is what most of Atlantic history is). Also, recent challenges to Atlantic history have come from Global Historians (There is a notable article by Peter Coclanis from maybe a decade ago), and people who think the Atlantic has overshadowed North American interest in a passage to the Pacific (Paul Mapp). It's a good field, and being "transnational" is increasingly important, but it's not a huge undertaking or particularly novel at this point. If you are an early Americanist, it's borderline expected that you will engage with the Atlantic World. Almost everybody in my department who works on history before the 20th century does Atlantic history including the Hispanists, Francophones, and Americanists.

I never took a language exam, as there isn't a second language important to my work. I probably could have passed the German exam, but my adviser advised that even working a little on this would be a waste of time, as it has no relation to my work. That being said most Americanists in my department at least have spanish or french, which usually has some application to their work. I am working on Spanish a little in my spare time for a side project. Short answer is most americanist will have a second language, but a lot of programs do have alternatives if it is not particularly relevant to your work.

This might be a bit of a cheet, but my dissertation is masked intellectual history, but I am able to couch it as cultural history, because I use a lot of non-traditional sources that takes it out of the realm traditional intellectual history. I have also been advised by people to make sure to refer to my diss. as cultural history when talking to presses. This is the same with microhistory and biography. A lot of microhistory is closer to biography, but it sounds less old fashioned to call it micro-history (not say all micro-history is this, and I love micro-history).