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.
