Strider_2931

I haven't yet posted here this cycle. I have to make a decision on two offers and I wanted to have the input of this forum when all is said and done. Maybe someone has faced a similar dilemma between a program offering better financial support and a program offering a stronger intellectual fit. The programs are equal other than this dilemma. I'll be studying twentieth-century US environmental and social history come the fall.
Based on the advice I've gleaned here over the years, my instinct is to go with the program that provides a slight edge in support, via a recruitment fellowship with a release of teaching for three years. The catch is that I wouldn't be able to continue studying environmental history exclusively because the department lacks a specialist in this field.
The other program offers a 12-month TAship package, with built-in research time. I've also been attracted by the year-long editorial assistantship position at the flagship environmental history journal that is housed in the department. This department actually has one of the top collections of environmental historians anywhere. So, not getting to study with this group is a significant downside in going with the program offering the recruitment fellowship. Though I would have this fellowship, and it is no doubt a prestigious and competitive award, I would have to find an outside scholar if I wanted to continue to engage with environmental scholarship.
My experience with this forum has ingrained in my thinking the importance of financial support. Having three years free of a TAship, to set up and start a research plan, to write more for publication, to gain other professional experiences beyond teaching, seems to me to be the way to go. With the caveat that I wouldn't be exclusively an environmental historian upon completion of this program. Am I missing something that would change my instinct to go with the program offering the fellowship?

Keep in mind, folks, as you calculate your stipend and cost of living (COL), please divide the total stipend by 12, not 9 and take out required student fees and 12% for taxes (at minimum!) to get your actual monthly take-home pay.  If the school says 9 months, divide the total by 12 anyway.
Ask grad programs about student fees -- they should have a list handy. You should also see which ones can be opted out. If your school offers health insurance and it's solid, find out the cost.
If your university offers a retirement plan (like a state pension), please, please contribute if you can. The savings will build up over time and be transferred into a IRA. It might seem like a nightmare to give up $200 monthly for retirement when you can use it for a bigger apartment or a car in a place you don't really need a car (like NYC), you will be glad after 5-8 years in the program that the first $200 yields to, say, $10k or so when you finish and that number will get higher over the next 40 years.
Far, far too many first year students don't think about this until the spring when they realize that they need to find summer jobs to pay their rent instead of doing language or another training program or studying for their exams or researching for MA thesis.
 
@wluhist16  I chose financial stability over intellectual.  My adviser and I were the only ones doing our field but being a minority forced me to challenge myself intellectually in order to connect with other areas of history. In fact, it has made me a solid grant-writer and a teacher who can offer a variety of courses based her own area of specialty.  I made sure that I attended the yearly conference in my field and networked with other scholars and grad students who I could communicate with to flesh out my research ideas and prepare for my candidacy exams. If I had to make this choice all over again, I would even if I was frustrated and/or  intellectually lonely many times.
 
More info is still needed for us to really help you figure out your situation.

Yeah, I'm with @psstein - I don't see enough information to make a good judgement. How much is the difference, and is the financial difference $30k vs $35k or $15k vs $20k - the same difference matters more in different circumstances. How does cost of Living in the respective cities factor in?
(NB: as of this year, most Ivy+ schools are offering $40-45k as a stipend. Unionization works ✊)

I would certainly go for the 12 months of support. Personally, I had 9 during the summers (last paycheck was May 31st, first was September 30) and things could get very challenging in the first month back from the summer. I'd recommend looking at the placement records of each department before making a decision.
FWIW, if you're going to work with an environmental history journal, you're likely to have exposure to other scholars in the field. Please PM me, if you're willing, and we can discuss programs at some more length. 

I haven't yet posted here this cycle. I have to make a decision on two offers and I wanted to have the input of this forum when all is said and done. Maybe someone has faced a similar dilemma between a program offering better financial support and a program offering a stronger intellectual fit. The programs are equal other than this dilemma. I'll be studying twentieth-century US environmental and social history come the fall.
Based on the advice I've gleaned here over the years, my instinct is to go with the program that provides a slight edge in support, via a recruitment fellowship with a release of teaching for three years. The catch is that I wouldn't be able to continue studying environmental history exclusively because the department lacks a specialist in this field.
The other program offers a 12-month TAship package, with built-in research time. I've also been attracted by the year-long editorial assistantship position at the flagship environmental history journal that is housed in the department. This department actually has one of the top collections of environmental historians anywhere. So, not getting to study with this group is a significant downside in going with the program offering the recruitment fellowship. Though I would have this fellowship, and it is no doubt a prestigious and competitive award, I would have to find an outside scholar if I wanted to continue to engage with environmental scholarship.
My experience with this forum has ingrained in my thinking the importance of financial support. Having three years free of a TAship, to set up and start a research plan, to write more for publication, to gain other professional experiences beyond teaching, seems to me to be the way to go. With the caveat that I wouldn't be exclusively an environmental historian upon completion of this program. Am I missing something that would change my instinct to go with the program offering the fellowship?

I would think about university rank and placement record, as well as ultimately what your goals are for your future career.
If you want to teach at a very research-oriented university to the exclusion of considering schools with high-teaching loads, then the recruitment fellowship might be worth it, although those jobs are few and far between. However, I'd also say that since the majority of jobs right now are at teaching-focused institutions, you could be a disadvantage in future job applications if your CV appears too research-oriented. (Not to say that you can teach your way to a job, you can't, there has to be balance, but teaching positions want people with... teaching experience and an understanding of pedagogy.) I'm just speaking from personal experience as someone who is about to defend, was on the market this year, and accepted an offer at a regional public university with a 4-4 teaching load. I needed the fellowships/publications to get noticed, but all of my job interviews were focused on classroom management and pedagogy. 
If you have other career goals, then disregard and pick the university where your scholarly relationship with your advisor is best, regardless if they are a strictly environmental historian or not. My project shifted during grad school and no longer aligned with my advisor as closely as when I entered, but a good advisor is a good advisor regardless.

I haven't yet posted here this cycle. I have to make a decision on two offers and I wanted to have the input of this forum when all is said and done. Maybe someone has faced a similar dilemma between a program offering better financial support and a program offering a stronger intellectual fit. The programs are equal other than this dilemma. I'll be studying twentieth-century US environmental and social history come the fall.
Based on the advice I've gleaned here over the years, my instinct is to go with the program that provides a slight edge in support, via a recruitment fellowship with a release of teaching for three years. The catch is that I wouldn't be able to continue studying environmental history exclusively because the department lacks a specialist in this field.
The other program offers a 12-month TAship package, with built-in research time. I've also been attracted by the year-long editorial assistantship position at the flagship environmental history journal that is housed in the department. This department actually has one of the top collections of environmental historians anywhere. So, not getting to study with this group is a significant downside in going with the program offering the recruitment fellowship. Though I would have this fellowship, and it is no doubt a prestigious and competitive award, I would have to find an outside scholar if I wanted to continue to engage with environmental scholarship.
My experience with this forum has ingrained in my thinking the importance of financial support. Having three years free of a TAship, to set up and start a research plan, to write more for publication, to gain other professional experiences beyond teaching, seems to me to be the way to go. With the caveat that I wouldn't be exclusively an environmental historian upon completion of this program. Am I missing something that would change my instinct to go with the program offering the fellowship?

Is anyone else finding it kind of funny when on the results page for 'History' all these Art History results also pop up?   In some ways it's interesting because I've seen some universities like UW Madison releasing their results for Art History in the last few days so hoping that means History won't be too long now. I know UW Madison released their Political Science results a week or so ago because it was mentioned on another thread I follow.

Like the groundhog, I checked for acceptance emails today. There were none, so that means six more weeks of winter. Or something like that...
Actually, I'm curious if anyone out there heard from UIUC. I wouldn't be surprised if their acceptances went out last week and their rejections came through tomorrow. Granted, this is just speculation based on the data from last year.
Northwestern rejected me on Saturday. Vanderbilt, UIUC, and BU, are the programs I ended up applying to. Just an Americanist waiting to hear back this cycle.
 

True story re: the refreshing email.
I did not apply to Princeton or Yale (though if I don't make it in this cycle, I might cast my net wider and see what happens...) but I do find myself at this point remarkably zen about the waiting.  Maybe it's the two rejects and coming to peace with the fact that maybe I won't make it into any school this cycle (this being said, I really hope that's not the case).
Good luck to those who have applied to Princeton and Yale!  The campus at Yale is very cool and the environs around the campus are very walkable in my recollection.

Haven’t heard from UIUC yet but since there are no entries at all on the survey I think they probably haven’t released anything yet. A lot of places are a bit behind this year. 
 
Vanderbilt gave out 5-7 acceptances Friday so unfortunately if you didn’t hear then there won’t be good news from them. My POI emailed me back Monday letting me know while I was a strong candidate the spaces were limited this year. 
 
Best of luck, I’m an Americanist too ?

Like the groundhog, I checked for acceptance emails today. There were none, so that means six more weeks of winter. Or something like that...
Actually, I'm curious if anyone out there heard from UIUC. I wouldn't be surprised if their acceptances went out last week and their rejections came through tomorrow. Granted, this is just speculation based on the data from last year.
Northwestern rejected me on Saturday. Vanderbilt, UIUC, and BU, are the programs I ended up applying to. Just an Americanist waiting to hear back this cycle.
 

Like the groundhog, I checked for acceptance emails today. There were none, so that means six more weeks of winter. Or something like that...
Actually, I'm curious if anyone out there heard from UIUC. I wouldn't be surprised if their acceptances went out last week and their rejections came through tomorrow. Granted, this is just speculation based on the data from last year.
Northwestern rejected me on Saturday. Vanderbilt, UIUC, and BU, are the programs I ended up applying to. Just an Americanist waiting to hear back this cycle.
 

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.
 
 

@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.

Have you considered applying to HSTM (History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) programs? I can think of advising combos at Princeton that might be cool for your project.

You've gotten a lot of good advice and questions here, but to jump in: I think you may be missing a very valuable opportunity to talk about race here. To my ear, "development of healthy populations" strongly connotes either civilizing mission (as Sigaba already suggested), or defining some kind of healthy white heartland as a counterweight to the "sick," diseased, nonwhite South (and new sites of American imperialism, like the Philippines).
My own program is only accepting students for 2021-22 who work on race in some capacity, and I suspect others will follow, either explicitly or not. If you want to make your work seem relevant, urgent, and worth funding, I would find a way to ensure that it speaks to this particular moment—in which a national conversation about racial justice and a massive public health crisis have become entangled (and to say nothing of the ways in which current election discourse is rife with depictions of a white American heartland....)
On a slightly more nitpicky note, the actors in your research questions are abstract entities: journals, writings, publications, sites. Give us actual people doing actual things: doctors, sanitarians, nurses, social workers, missionaries, and so on.
 

@Strider_2931 
Both @HardyBoy and @gsc are suggesting what may be turns away from your ideas. Yet, you may have an opportunity to position your research as exceptionally relevant to understanding the background of contemporaneous debates over public health (COVID-19), women's health (sexual violence against women), climate science, and medical sciences.

My exposure to the works of social historians studying modern Germany have made me very skeptical of teleological approaches to the past. And I don't believe that history has "lessons." However, as the profession remains plagued by questions about relevance, you could play a role in helping to understand how the midwest got to where it is now on issues related to health and science generally.
Just $0.02 from a person who has to wait an extra hour this morning before drinking coffee.

FWIW, the only subfield I'm still seeing TT jobs listed in this year is either American History with a specialization in the African-American experience or African Diaspora. 

I should clarify! Your regional position matters (when you apply). Departments still group applications into regional categories, for one. I was responding to your concern about the "type" of historian you would be -- "the cultural/religious/economic/etc labels don't matter as much as your ability to show you have a well thought out project". I.e. don't spend too much energy trying to work out if you're a cultural historian. 

I think that among the challenges you face is that you'll be competing for an extraordinarily limited number of positions with applicants who have fine tuned their visions of their personal professional development since they were in high school.
As things stand, it is very difficult for me understand how your research will move the needle in broader historiographical debates among Americanists who specialize in the time periods you identify. How will a study of the discourse over public health at the transnational, national and local levels help us to understand better how the midwest became the midwest?
In the grand scheme of things, are you suggesting that "section" still mattered as a category of historical analysis into the early twentieth century more/less than historians have argued recently? Are you seeking to point out that historians of the progressive era have overlooked key sources of the movement? Are you suggesting that the discourse over public health in the midwest is evidence of a project to "civilize" the interior of America much the same as missionaries sought to "civilize" a growing American empire? 
From my perspective, I think that readers of your SOP would benefit if you were to define your terms and boundaries more precisely. (I most strongly suggest that you reconsider how many things you seek to compare to each other. For now, two or three are plenty. Taking a whack at multiple regions may be a project better served by your third or fourth book.)
I think that you should not refer to cultural history until you have a better sense of what is cultural history and why it remains both relevant to current professional practices but also dangerous. 
I very respectfully disagree with @OHSP. I think that you should have a serviceable definition of yourself as an Americanist, and that definition should tie in neatly (if also provisionally) with your research interests and career goals. (Think in terms of what undergraduate and graduate courses you would teach.) This POV is based upon my blind guess that this will go down as the most competitive application season in decades -- a "buyers' market" in which departments will be able to set the bar almost as high as they like.

The quality of a research question depends on how well you motivate it historiographically. So, here's a question you'll get a lot in grad school: why should anyone care about how public health discourse represented the Midwest?

It's still a little unclear to me why you would apply with four different projects (which will require four different SOPs). I would highly recommend working on one solid SOP that emphasizes your research questions--this is an opportunity to show profs that you can ask incisive and interesting questions. What are your research questions, out of interest? I don't think it's necessarily that important to "position yourself" -- for sure show that you are engaged with your field and you understand how your project relates to the concerns of the field, but the cultural/religious/economic/etc labels don't matter as much as your ability to show you have a well thought out project. From what you've written above it's not clear to me what you want to do in grad school for the next 5-7 years, so you want to avoid writing like this in your SOP. I'd advise beginning with the two-three pressing questions that are driving your project--and those should a) indicate to profs in your field that you know what's happening in current debates; b) indicate to profs in and beyond your field that you know what a research question looks like; c) be compelling and interesting (and you sort of need to think about how you are going to make your SOP questions more compelling and interesting than the questions that other applicants are going to pose).