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I don't know about OP's ambitions, but I know I would be happy, ecstatic even, to teach at a regional university (Minnesota State Mankato, Cameron University in Lawton, Ok, University of Alaska-Anchorage and the like). From what I can see, there, a PhD from a "mid-tier" program is as good, if not better than, an Ivy education. Cameron, my alma mater, has 5 history professors. They are from OU (3), UMN, and Texas Tech. We had a guy from Vanderbilt for a year, but he had a one year contract and they didn't extend it. I was on the hiring committee for university positions and one of their concerns was the COST of hiring an Ivy grad. Ivy grads typically demanded more pay in their applications. They also don't think they have the one-on-one classroom training like the state schools. My largest class was capped at 30 students and upper division classes are capped at 20 (I had a class of 4 for Mediterranean history, 3 for French II). The hiring committee, and I, believed that there is a difference between a "research professor" and "teaching professor." How happy is a "research professor" going to be when the split is 75% teaching, 20% service, 5% research? Are they going to be happy sponsoring History Club and hosting movie nights? What about serving on a dozen university committees outside their field?

Please excuse the formatting. I was playing "deconstruct the syllabus and bib." Because some of the books seem "off" based on the class title, I included a brief description of the paper they go with. I have some other bibs, but I don't feel like digging through Dropbox right now. All secondary sources Baseball History- Senior Capstone on the American West. How the American West shaped the rules of baseball after the Civil War through 1908 Block, David. Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Dreifort, John E. Baseball History from Outside the Lines. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Goldstein, Warren. Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball. London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Sullivan, Dean A. Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Thorn, John. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: A Secret History of the Game. New York City: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History. New York City: Oxford University Press, 2000. German History- History of Germany from Unification to the fall of the Berlin Wall. These are all from the syllabus. The books were in German. Paper was about the humanity of Joseph Goebbels. Welch, Third Reich- politics and propaganda Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany: 1800 to the Present, Second Edition, (ISBN: 978-0-470-65581-8) Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Noon (ISBN: 978-1935554189) Gerhart Hauptmann, Plays (ISBN: 978-0826407276) Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (ISBN: 978-0449213940) Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story (ISBN: 978-0226739410) Dutch Republic- Independent study in the historiography of the Dutch Republic. Paper was about using the Union of Utrecht and the Pacification of Ghent as political dialogue. Arnade, Peter. Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Cornell U Press; October 2008 Rowen, Herbert. The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic. Cambridge U Press; September 1990 Koenigsberger, HG. Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Cambridge U Press; February 2002 Stensland, Monica. Habsburg Communication in the Dutch Revolt. Amsterdam U Press; June 2012 Deen, Femke. Publiek debat en propaganda in Amsterdam tijdens de Nederlandse Opstand. Amsterdam U Press; November 2014 Gelderen, Martin. The Political Thought of the Dutch Republic 1555-1590. Cambridge U Press; October 2002 Geevers, Liesbeth. Gevallen vazallen: De integratie van Oranje, Egmonth en Horn in de Spaans-Habsburgse monarchie (1559-1567). Amsterdam U Press; September 2008 Soen, Violet. Vredehandel: Adellijke en Habsburgse verzoeningspogingen de Nederlandse Opstand (1564-1581). Amsterdam U Press; December 2012 Vermeesch, Griet. Oorlog, steden en staatsvorming: De grenssteden Gorinchem en Doensburg tijdens de geboorte-eeuw van de Republiek (1570-1680). Amsterdam U Press; September 2006 Mediterranean History- From the syllabus. Obvious class description. Paper was an analysis of a travel journal of the Dutch Navy David, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Jacksonian Era- Easy enough to figure out what the class was about. Paper was about the effects of the 1848 German Revolution on the transition from the Jacksonian Era/Individualism to the Civil War/Collectivism Kohl, Lawrence Frederick. The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character In the Jacksonian Era New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Moggach, Douglas and Paul Leduc Browne. The Social Question and the Democratic Revolution: Marx and the Legacy of 1848. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2000. Randers-Pehrson, Justine Davis. Adolf Douai, 1819-1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-Eighter in the Homeland and in the United States. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000. Stadelman, Rudolph. Social and Political History of the German 1848 Revolution. Translated by James G. Chastain. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1970. Siemann, Wolfman. The German Revolution of 1848-49. Translated by Christiane Banerji. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Tóth, Heléna. An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848-1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. War and Depression- US History from 1918- 1945. Paper was about the First Red Scare (Summer 1920) and how the anarchist movement should be included in the literature Feldman, Jay. Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America.New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Kramer, Reinhold and Tom Mitchell. When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens Committee Broke the Winnepeg General Strike. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Nielsen, Kim E. Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Schmidt, Regin. Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943. Gylling, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000.

It’s the only program I applied to, so I don’t really know what goes into an SoP other than what was asked. Maybe they just spell it out or have an outline. The questions are below. How would you like to grow as an historian and intellectual during your time in graduate school? How has your understanding of history changed in the course of your studies thus far? What problems of understanding or interpretation are you most interested in engaging during your time in graduate school? What was the most interesting and formative class you took as an undergraduate outside the history department, and how did it shape how you look at the past and at historical writing? Many people become aware sometime during their youth of the power of the past. How is history different from the past? What is the most difficult dimension of studying and practicing history? What are examples of difficult historical problems? Why should we pay attention to them?

She told me she was when I went in and talked to her, just not as many as she has in the past. I’m now looking at Louthan because of the Church aspect, too. But, Shank said that he doesn’t know Dutch, but that he does have connections in the Netherlands and I could pull in someone from the German, Scandinavian, Dutch Department. Tracy has also said that while he cannot act in any official capacity because he retired, that he is more than happy to consult. My undergrad advisor was a student of Tracy and Reyerson. Reyerson was his wife’s primary advisor and has recently talked to them on the phone about me.

Portland to Chicago for Dec. 22 is only $399...but, it's a 45 hour train ride! That's coach, so no bunk. I'm very envious of Europe's train system.

Check how long the train takes, though. Amtrak is not the most efficient. I just looked at Chicago to DC and it's 23 hours. There is not a train that runs North-South (I checked Chicago-Dallas, Minneapolis-Dallas). That Chicago-DC train? $520-1371 one way! I ran a comparison for dates (Dec 22-26 because we were talking about the holidays), and a flight from Chicago to DC is $381 roundtrip on Delta.

My parents flew me down for Thanksgiving and I'm not going back until May-ish to see my friends graduate from undergrad and then it will only be for a few weekend. For Christmas, I'll be going skiing up here unless it's too cold. If it is, I'll be making glühwein and watching football and maybe go to Christmas Mass (Christmas and Easter Catholic because they are in Latin). Last year, I was living close to my parents and still ended up only spending half a day with family on Christmas because I flew out to Berlin to spend the New Year with my boyfriend. Spring Break, I flew to Amsterdam and Rome for a trip with the boyfriend instead of spending time with family. I moved up here right after graduation. However, what I do may not be what you should do. I'm not particularly close to my family and even when I lived a mile from my parents, I didn't spend much time with them. I do have my car here and have made the drive back and forth (800 miles one way) about a dozen times when I lived down there because my boyfriend lived up here. The drive that far really is not fun, especially because I would do it without stopping. The few times I have traveled since moving up here, I hired someone to stay at my apartment, but that's only because I have three rabbits and they are needy. I wouldn't worry about my apartment if they weren't here.

What's going to happen when you get your PhD and the companies you apply for find out that you screwed over someone in the field? How apt are new companies to hire a researcher that blatantly lied? Aren't there ethics issues in the sciences where lying really doesn't look good?

Weird question as I've been reading around about the application process (already submitted, so it's a curiosity). Did any of your applications ask for something OTHER than an SoP? The U had specific questions to answer that did not sound like a research proposal instead of a typical SoP. I was wondering if that happened at other unis.

I'd love to know, too. I hadn't heard that anywhere else I have visited and I went to a few universities in the states and in Europe to check out their programs over the last year and a half. They were the first to ask anything like that. Of course, I would LOVE to stay in Minnesota. I have an obsession with winter and love the culture around the cities.

I'll have to look into that. I'm rereading a few articles now and trying to catch up with what was released in the past few months in my semi-hidden other obsession- baseball history and sabermetrics. That's actually what my senior paper was on, but we were relegated to studying the American West and that's the only topic that could hold my interest.

If we expressed an interest in grad school while in undergrad, it was highly suggested we minor in foreign languages. Once you learn your first language in a language group, the rest are easier. I did have 4 years of German before undergrad, though, so I think that helped. I took German, French, and Dutch at the collegiate level for 3 years, which made Afrikaans and Frisian easy (I know, they're dialects, but don't tell them that), and Italian is coming pretty easily with the French background. I love your suggestion of doing language courses at a community college. That's something I would have never thought to suggest. It's probably the best and least expensive track for languages. I wish they would push history majors in undergrad more towards languages as a minor than they currently do.

I will definitely check it out. Thank you again for your suggestions.

I worked in a children’s history museum as a facilitator for a few years (and volunteered in the archives and archaeology) and love it. The Rijksmuseum would be my dream job. Leiden would be choice #2 if I can talk the boyfriend into another European move. I am going to work on my prose. I want to improve. I’m thinking about applying to Columbia’s summer program for this year, but that is more languages and paleography with some writing. I would have the boyfriend help with the prose because he has his PhD, but his writing is very similar to mine.

For TU Delft, a confirmation statement does mean a commitment. They need it early to start working on a Visa and to find international student housing accommodations.

I should have mentioned that I also got asked by a few profs when I went to a consortium meeting if I was planning on staying in the state even if that meant moving to Internatonal Falls. I will always be willing to be mobile, but if I get in, it’s going to be interesting to find a place with jobs for two historians. We also both love winter and won’t go back to the south, so that narrows down the choices. Then again, Minneapolis Public Schools pays PhDs more than a lot of universities I’ve seen, so there’s always that route. Or, there’s moving to Europe more permanently or working in the private sector. We have a lot of multinational company headquarters up here that love PhDs and don’t necessarily care which PhD.

Luckily, my sophomore seminar class was focused on New Netherland, so i got travel journals that way. Mediterranean history, I concentrated on De leven van Admiraal de Ruiter, which was a travel journal and what got me interested in the Mediterranean. His descriptions of the people he encountered was the focus of that paper. I also did some work with travel documents of a Dutch merchant in Japan for French Revolution. A little explanation on that one because it may sound weird, but for that class, the prof wanted to try something new, so our paper was cited historical fiction- a memoir chapter of someone experiencing the Revolution from the outside or from the inside not in a "bougie" capacity. My memoir was a Dutch silk merchant living with his son in Paris and how the revolution affected their trade. His son got guillotined because it added depth. The French Revolution is actually why the Dutch lost exclusive trading rights with Japan. I was looking at doing South Africa as a minor field because of the Afrikaans and because it does add depth. I also love reading about the Dutch Antilles and colonialism off the coast of South America, but I don't have any background languages from the region and would probably need Spanish or Portuguese. I love how the Dutch would capture ships leaving the mainland and hold them for ransom. And then there is the Dutch/British technology wars over the processing of herring on ships versus needing to take them into port. And don't get me started on the East Indies spice trade and the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Indonesia supremacy for New Netherland was an amazing trade. And, I could go on and on about Dutch travel. It's my true passion. I'm going to have to look up that article. It sounds very interesting and there is never enough to read.

The American Academy in Rome has one that's supposed to be really good. I loved Rome when I visited last year.

Social Studies Ed was my major for all of 2 weeks. I observed a high school class, decided it wasn't for me, and changed my major. There is also a big push in Oklahoma, where I'm from, for SSE majors to also learn how to coach a sport. No thank you. Have you looked at summer programs on H-net? I don't know about Latin, but I know other languages have schools. Or maybe applying to a summer Latin program in Italy? A lot of those programs have funding and Italy is a beautiful country.

I do know, after talking to Dr Reyerson, that your languages need to be strong before the PhD at the U. Latin for medievalists is a must if you want to work with her. It's one of the reasons I minored in languages in undergrad.

The Dutch government itself is having a hard time promoting Dutch history/language/culture. English history, English language, English culture, etc is and has been the norm in the Netherlands for a few decades. They have strong French and German influences and a Spanish background (invasions and occupations of a small region does that sometimes). There has been a resurgence of the subfield, however, in the Netherlands from international applicants for two reasons- the government will fast track your citizenship/guarantee income for a specific period of time and funding is in the archives. It's not a popular field in the USA. There are two post-grad tracks I would love to do, either teach at a small state school like St. Cloud State or Minnesota State Mankato OR move to the Netherlands and work in the archives (I do have a few years experience in museums, archives, and archaeology). I would add a second public history masters to the PhD if I did the second track through the Vrij Universeteit Amsterdam or Universeteit van Amsterdam because of their strong connections to the city archives and the Rijksmuseum. I applied to and was accepted to both last year before I decided on a gap year and I have stayed in contact with both programs.

It would be a comparative program- Mediterranean is the main focus of the cohort now, so I'm thinking about Dutch Republic-papal states. I took 9 classes on various parts of early modern history in undergrad, mostly Europe focused, but some Asia and North Africa, nothing US (only took the required 3 classes, pre-1865, post, and one other; did Jacksonian Era, Women in Politics, and 1917-1945).

The application for UMN specifically asked how many other/what schools you were applying to and why the U specifically. It also, however, asked if you were a Minnesota resident and planned on staying in the state post-grad. That may just be a Minne thing because their big push right now is keeping people in state after graduation.

My interests lie in the role of the Dutch in the Mediterranean. I specifically want to look at Dutch-Papal State relationships during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. I've also talked to Dr. Reyerson. She's a very nice person and I've been able to sit in some consortium talks with her. I chose Dr. Reyerson and Dr. Shank. Neither are specifically in my research area, but both have said that they would be interested in the topic and Shank has some connections in Utrecht that would be helpful. I've talked to Dr. Louthan a few times, but our areas don't overlap as much. The person that got me interested in my field and excited about grad school retired- Dr. Tracy. I moved to Minneapolis a few months ago and live about 3 miles from campus, so I have been lucky enough to go to campus a few times.

I am in history. I want to concentrate on Dutch history, but Tracy retired, so I've talked to Reyerson and Shank about looking at the role of the Dutch in the Mediterranean.