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RevolutionBlues

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Everything posted by RevolutionBlues

  1. Modern Europe, Early Modern Europe, and Political Economy/History of Capitalism.
  2. My understanding of the Fulbright is that they are less likely to fund your project if you have spent extensive (i.e. more than a year) in the host country. I would echo the above statements that the most important element to work on as an undergrad is your foreign language skills. While studying abroad is generally the quickest way to pick them up, it is absolutely not necessary provided you can demonstrate some degree of fluency in other ways.
  3. I'd like to echo many of the above statements about really thinking through and writing a compelling personal statement explaining how your experiences have led you to pursue a graduate degree in history, what you want to study, and what you hope to do with it. More importantly, however, I would caution you to use this as an opportunity to really think through what types of places you want to apply. Most terminal MAs, especially at top universities, are unfunded. Even if you are eligible for the post-9/11 GI Bill, this could leave you seriously in debt. Whether this is worth it depends on what use you are hoping to put the degree to; is a prestigious degree necessary for it, or would a fully funded MA from a mid-tier school allow you to meet the same career goals without the debt? In considering your fit with a program, these might be aspects you'll want to weigh.
  4. I'll disagree with the consensus and say that I think this is an important issue. Popular and academic prose are related yet distinct styles, and the historian ought to practice and hope to master both forms. Academic prose is important because it allows us to discuss esoteric issues and debate minutiae among experts (i.e. academic journals); popular prose is important because it allows us to share the basic findings with the broader public (i.e. major press books). Without the former we cannot move the field forward; without the latter the field ceases to become publicly relevant—which can either be viewed from the self-interested view that assumed irrelevance leads to declining enrollments and less funding, or from the more idealistic notion that as scholars we ought to conduct our work with its impact on broader society in mind because history in particular and the social sciences and humanities in general actually matter.
  5. This may not be a particularly helpful response as I am not super familiar with German history, but I can speak a little to the field of European labor history more generally. In short, the traditional type of labor and social history of the 1960s and '70s has largely fallen out of favor among historians. One could speculate on several reasons for this, but the effect is that few active historians work directly in that vein and most programs would likely be hesitant to devote resources to what they see as an outdated historiography. However, that being said, I believe there is somewhat of a resurgence in interest in labor history through indirect methods. For example, looking at labor in a colonial context using intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender; environmental history and the materiality of labor as a way to tie into the production of taste; focusing on migrant labor and the construction of identity through mobilities, including those like railway workers or sailors whose labor is movement; and, my personal favorite, using the History of Capitalism as a way to problematize class relations in a way that moves beyond simple proletarianization or photo-industrialization theories into a more robust examination of the role of labor and class within the logic of capitalism. The only direct recommendation for a program to look at that I know off the top of my head (given that I'm not a Germanist) would UMichigan, where Kathleen Canning and Geof Eley have done similar work. Allison Johnson at Harvard works on Austria, but has some similar interests. Perhaps a more fruitful way to look for potential programs, though, might be to frame yourself as looking at labor through the lens of a field more in vogue these days and then look for somebody that might be sympathetic to that project. It might also be helpful to look for places with faculty working on related themes outside of Germany. For example, if you did, say, go the colonial labor route and found a primary advisor working on German colonialism, you could have on your committee an Americanist who does labor (there are still quite a few of them around) and maybe somebody who does British economic history. It might be helpful, given that straight social history of labor is somewhat out of fashion and you might have a hard time finding a primary advisor who perfectly matches your interests, to think more in terms of what departments could offer a constellation of faculty members not necessarily limited to your geographic interests, but each of whom touches on one element of your project. At any rate, your work sounds interesting; best of luck!
  6. It's worth looking into a bit more in depth (see the thread on the History of Capitalism), but in a nutshell over the last three decades the field of "economic history" has gone from being primarily housed within the discipline of history to being primarily housed within the discipline of economics. Basically, the former approach is much more contextual and focused on the economy in history and the latter is much more quantitative and often boils down to running econometric formulas on data sets from the past. In terms of focus and languages, if you want to pursue economic history in the econometric sense, having interests in several continents and no language background should be fine if your quantitative skills are snazzy, but you'll want to be looking at economics programs for that. If you're more interested in bringing econometric skills to the table but are committed to a more historical approach (which, as an aside, I really hope is the case because we need more historians like that), you will probably need to narrow your interests down to a particular region and time, learn the relevant languages, and immerse yourself in the historiography of that subfield. For example, you might be really hard pressed to convince a history department to let you study medieval Europe AND early US history. Even as a primary and secondary field such disparate foci might raise red flags. If you do go the Early American route, you should probably consider UVA. But I get the impression that you may have chosen schools that are just in the top tier when it might be pragmatic to shoot for a broader spread based on fit. For example, the only economic historian in this sense at Berkeley that I know about is Jan de Vries, who does early modern European with an emphasis on the Netherlands, and he's retiring. But the economics department there does have the Berkeley Economic History Lab. In short, I would first really think about what exactly your interests are, decide if that is more in line with an economics or history department, then look for people that have similar interests AND the ability to teach economic history, and then decide which of those are worth applying to.
  7. I similarly went to a small state school for undergrad and think it might have worked against me in PhD applications (although probably not nearly as much as all of the other shortcomings, i.e. lack of clear purpose, language skills, etc). This didn't seem to matter as much after getting an MA from a larger state school, although again the bigger factor was probably just being better prepared and better qualified. I would disagree with telkanuru a little bit to say that most students I have met at top-tier graduate programs went to fancy schools for their undergrads, whether ivy league, flagship state universities, or highly selective SLACs. However, this is potentially more correlation than causation. In short, I agree with mvlchicago.
  8. For anyone considering, entering, or currently attending a graduate program in history, the AHA just published a Guide to Graduate Study in History that might be a useful resource. It is accessible at: www.historians.org/grad-guide-pdf
  9. In answer to your first question, I would like to second what Telkanuru said and strongly disagree with what Wicked_Problem said. It is not necessarily an either/or applying to MA and PhD programs, except as determined by your limited time in filling out and your financial resources in submitting the applications. Some programs, like UWashington, will automatically consider you for an MA if you are not admitted for the PhD. Other schools, like UCBerkeley, do not have an MA option. Other schools only have an MA option. I would recommend casting a wide net and seeing what you drag in. Depending on your ambitions (i.e. whether you are set on tenure and teaching specialized courses at Harvard or would be perfectly content teaching the entire history of humanity at Southern Ozark Mining College), it might make sense to initially apply for schools higher up the rankings for a PhD and a wider range of schools for an MA, which would then leave you the option of "jumping" the rankings after you've shored up your CV a bit. I would, however, only agree with Wicked_Problem's suggestion of paying for an MA if you are Scrooge McDuck and your swimming pool of bullion is so overflowing that you can't find any other use for it. I would be very cautious about taking out loans for an MA, even from a prestigious program. Others may differ, but the job prospects with just an MA in history are so far between, the odds of turning that into a top-tier PhD admit so long, and the availability of funded MA programs frequent enough that I would strongly caution against an unfunded MA program, as tempting as it might be. In answer to your second question, if what dragged down your GPA was in the first year that shouldn't be too bad, and some programs only look at your GPA for the last two years. A strong GRE score might be able to help compensate for this. As Telkanuru also hinted at, what you write on your statement of purpose and writing sample (which might be problematic if you didn't do a senior thesis) will be the most important parts of the application. In answer to your third question, you can probably look at recent literature within your proposed topic to get a sense of what the historiographical debates are and where you fit into them. Above all, however, work on language, language, language. If you're not fluent in German, keep working on it. If you are, start picking up French. Finally, congratulations on AmeriCorps! I did a year of AmeriCorps after my undergrad and it was a tremendously rewarding experience and one that was 1) noticed in my applications and 2) helped because a lot of schools will waive application fees for current VISTAs. Also, depending on your placement, you might be able to take language classes concurrently. I served at a university and was able to take two years of language courses while there. Good luck!
  10. Here's a really good essay by Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy covering the relationship between the fields of history and economics in regards to capitalism (it even begins with a Braudel quote!): http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-FallRise-of-Economic/150247 If that link doesn't work, here is the [the beginning of the] full text: "Irritated, one shoos it out the door, and almost immediately it climbs in through the window." Without the concept of capitalism, the late French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote, it was impossible to study economic history. But the reverse is equally true: We can't understand capitalism without economic history. Once a mainstay of history departments, economic history was, with historians' complicity, seized in the mid-20th century by economists who sucked the culture and chronology out of it and turned it into an obscure province of mathematical formulas. There it languished. The field became increasingly uncool. By the 1990s, to be a materialist in the age of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu was to be "deterministic"--in other words, a dinosaur. So economic history further retreated to economics departments, where many self-described economic historians had already been gathering under the banner of the "new economic history." The past decade has exposed some fundamental problems with that division of disciplinary labor. The now-old "new" economic history either fizzled or has become so technical, so unrecognizable to anyone who cannot wield its finely tuned analytics, that few historians can engage with it. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer economics departments now consider history--including the history of economics itself--a relevant domain of disciplinary inquiry, with many of the top departments having eliminated economic history from their programs altogether. ~~~~~~~~ By JEREMY ADELMAN and JONATHAN LEVY Jeremy Adelman is a professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at Princeton. His forthcoming book, Latin America: A Global History, will be published by Princeton University Press. Jonathan Levy is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and the author of the forthcoming book Ages of American Capitalism, to be published by Random House.
  11. lelick1234—Another good textbook for the history of economic thought is EK Hunt's History of Economic Thought. The original edition is certainly slanted towards Marxism, but is really good, although I have not read the newer revised and coauthored edition. KNP—If you're on the fence, I would certainly read Empire of Cotton. It is fairly long, but its written for a mass market and so it's actually a quick and enjoyable read. To clarify, the reason I really like this book is primarily methodological. As a new subfield only recently recognised by the AHA, the History of Capitalism is still in an experimental phase trying to discover itself and figure out how to be written. Sven Beckert is at the forefront of the push for this approach, and this work reflects his interest in defining capitalism as a distinctive and global phase in history. Key to this is intertwining political and economic (and some social) developments into a comprehensive narrative. That being said, it certainly has some drawbacks. For me the biggest problem is that it's somewhat of a history from above, focusing on capitalists and especially politicians ("War Capitalism" as a corrective to laissez-faire myths) without extending that same sense of agency to workers, whether "doubly free" or enslaved. The issue you raise is really important, but it is much more apparent in the article than in the book. I think the general argument he was making was that two hundred years of capitalism being based largely on a system of slavery was relatively quickly replaced by two hundred years of capitalism being based largely on wage labor. But he is very clear in the book that this transition from slavery to wage labor in places like Guiana and Brazil and from serfdom to wage labor in places like England, Egypt, and India were rooted in the coercive power of the state being bent to capitalist interests. In this sense, he is not so much pointing to a radical break as to a transition in the outward manifestation of the same underlying logic of capitalism. I think you're right that he may make this transition seem much more sudden than it really was and he certainly underemphasises the "weapons of the weak" in effecting this change. However, I would still totally recommend this book, if more for the overarching narrative and approach he's advocating than for the specific arguments.
  12. lelick1234— There was a discussion published in the September 2014 JAH called "Interchange: The History of Capitalism" that might be of interest to you. One of the things some of the contributors call for in it is the development of at least a basic—i.e. neoclassical—economic literacy among historians, given that in the general turn against "Marxist" histories in the '80s and '90s anything that referenced the economy was suspect. It's an important, but difficult, task because historians of capitalism also need to be savvy in foreign languages, cultural analysis, social history, etc. I would totally agree that such literacy allows a much deeper understanding of key theorists like Marx. My own thought is that for the quotation you referenced reading an intro to macroeconomics textbook, MOOC, or audited course could be sufficient, although I might expect a similar study of microeconomics to be beneficial as well. In terms of a few books to help build general knowledge of economic history, Ivan Berend has two survey texts on the economic history of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries that might be a good starting point, and I'm sure there are similar texts for American and Middle Eastern History. Check Cambridge University Press since they seem to publish the most economic history of the major university presses. You might also look at Joyce Appleby's Relentless Revolution as a general history of capitalism. In terms of works that consciously identify as being "History of Capitalism," Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told are good recent and popular works in this burgeoning field. If you're interested in historiography for the approach, look through the lists on http://www.historyofcapitalism.net/Readings-historiog.html Also check out the syllabi on http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu Finally, Cornell runs a history of capitalism boot camp in the summer to get historians up to speed on basic economic methods. ExponentialDecay—I tend to think that what differentiates economic history as done by economists and economic history as done by historians is methodology and sources, questions asked, and basic assumptions about humanity. Over the last several decades "economic history" has become dominated by economists asking questions about incentives and behaviour in the past, testing them empirically with primarily econometric methods, and rooted in the discipline's assumptions about rational choice. Nobel laureate Douglass North's institutional histories would be a good example of this. Historians, on the other hand, tend to situate economic behaviour within a broader set of questions about society, the environment, etc. The New Social History of the 1960s and '70s, i.e. Charles Tilly and EP Thompson, used the economy as the first step in a materialist path to understanding politics. Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis is an incredible example of economic history as done by historians. But this also reveals a very different definition of capitalism and understanding of human action, as visible in comparing History of Capitalism authors like Beckert and Baptist—who see capitalism as a complex and historically contingent development that interweaves economic factors within a broader social, political, environmental, and cultural milieu—with the contributors to The Cambridge History of Capitalism—which defines capitalism as rational economic behaviour and so sees it as universal in the human experience ever since Friday joined Crusoe and homo economicus was born. Generally I'm disappointed with those who try to bridge the gap, with Beckert's and Baptist's economics being really, really basic, while Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtue and Joel Mokyr's Enlightened Economy are similarly weak on modern historical methodology. However, some notable exceptions include Kenneth Pommeranz's Great Divergence, Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution, and Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction. I'm currently reading Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune and have only read parts of Alexia Yates's upcoming Selling Paris, but both also seem to do well at bridging the gap, although still certainly from more of a historical background.
  13. I'd second everything that ExponentialDecay said IF you're interested in a history of economic thought or ideas about capitalism. But there is a big split between histories of economic thought, economic history as done by economists looking at historical data sets, and economic history as done by historians investigating things economic. Most that try to blend the different approaches I think fall fairly flat, with a few notable exceptions. However, I am very enthusiastic about the potential of the new History of Capitalism movement. In short, what elements of the history of capitalism are you particularly interested in and do you think you might be interested in works rooted more in the methodology of historians, economists, or intellectual historians?—bearing in mind, of course, that the best works will seamlessly blend all of the above.
  14. UOregon also has a funded MA for history that is pretty solid. But I second the idea that the first step is to figure out what it is that you really want to study and where you want it to take you. If you're unsure about the latter, an MA can be a good way to figure that out; but if you're unsure about the former, convincing an MA to devote precious funding to an exploratory process might be a hard sell. Keep in mind, however, that you're not locked into your initial proposal. Graduate students can—and are often expected to—change their focus as they learn, develop, and mature as historians. But at least knowing what general geographical and thematic fields interest you can be a necessary prerequisite for picking up the language and methodological skills you will need for the MA and PhD. For example, if you go in as a 20th-century Americanist art historian and decide to switch to doing economic history of ancient Greece, the chances of successfully making that transition might be difficult.
  15. I don't have the figures on hand, but each year the AHA publishes PhDs granted and jobs posted by geographic subfield. If I remember correctly, there are about 450 PhDs granted each year in American history and about 200 jobs. For Middle Easter history, while a decade ago there were, say, 30 PhDs granted versus about 60 jobs, by now this has reversed to about 45 PhDs and 30 jobs. Fields like East Asian history are now starting to pick up with something like 90 jobs for 60 PhDs, African and Latin American history are on par with about 30 PhDs and jobs each, while European history has something like 150 PhDs and 100 jobs. So, it basically all depends on your preferences. There are certainly fields with much better PhD:job ratios; in your case this would be Middle Eastern history. On the other hand, if you want to have more selectivity in where you would like to end up, although the grad:job ratio is the hardest, American history has about as many job openings each year as all other fields combined. But I do second the advice that if you're looking for a CC-type job, teaching experience is probably more important than field.
  16. I highly recommend taking a look at The Professor Is In. While her posts are somewhat doom and gloom about the academic job market, the silver lining is that she provides thorough and targeted information on how exactly to shape your behaviors now in a way that will maximize your competitiveness on the job market a few years from now. I.e, how to structure your CV, what you should be doing at conferences, how to dress, etc. While it is true that after starting a program the shape of the job market over the next 5-8 years is out of your control, what your application looks like at the end of that time is entirely up to you (with help and luck, of course). Once you're committed to the path, you have to let the horrendous job market motivate you, not discourage you. I also second the notion that it is not just a matter of getting a job, but where you want to get a job. Although the market is still tight all the way down and prestige certainly helps, if you primarily want to teach a top-tier degree isn't necessarily required.
  17. One way to consider this might be that, instead of looking at a shift from "traditional" approaches to those that dominate the field today as one that was either imposed from without or arrived through a replacement process, to think of it as the outcome of a long-term dialogue and mediation between earnest and intelligent scholars. Historiography is the nothing more than a conversation among historians about how we ought to practice our craft; historiography is not fixed dogma handed unreflectively from one generation of historians to the next (although it might be very possible that individual scholars treat the prevailing approach dogmatically). The perhaps unfair issue is that the burden of proof always lies on the heterodox. In this sense, one could be entirely right about the need to return to or at least resurrect approaches (i.e. military history or, in my case, economic history) that "lost" the argument within the field. However, there was an argument, and if one shoulders the burden of heterodoxy he or she is implicitly accepting the task of mastering both their preferred approach, but also that which has replaced it in order to restart the conversation and be able to argue effectively about what exactly the reigning paradigm is missing. For example, Joan Wallach Scott started out as a New Social historian, and her first monograph, ​The Glassworkers of Carmaux, is a masterpiece of that approach. But when she helped launch or at least popularize a more post-structuralist and gendered tradition she had to do so by applying her thorough knowledge of the strengths of New Social History, but also its limitations. Only then was she able to apply, in the historical rather than historiographical essays in Gender and the Politics of History, a new methodology that overcame these shortcomings and built on them in a positive way. It is entirely possible that we need a full-scale shift back towards the "traditional" methods, but it is much more likely that in dialectical terms we need to challenge the reigning antithesis to the earlier thesis by progressing to a new synthesis that adopts the best of both but in a fresh way that advances the field to a higher level. This is to say, I understand that it may be frustrating to see that what one wants to do is not currently en vogue, but this should be seen as a challenge to revisit the historiographical debate that generated the shift from "traditional" to new in the first place, develop a deep and thorough understanding of the strengths and limitations of both, and then more effectively shape a methodology and argue for its necessity. While many professors or programs might not be open to such an intellectual program and may even in some cases stubbornly cling to their own ways, I believe that most people and places are wholly open to this very thing, provided that the effort to do so is open rather than closed, progressive rather than reactionary, and constructive rather than destructive. In fact, it is this very willingness to brave the unknown that reinvents and reinvigorates our field with every generation.
  18. Congrats to the Chicago admits! Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
  19. This might be an appropriate place to share my own experiences with this issue. Several years ago, as a starry-eyed undergrad at a small state school, I applied to three programs and was rejected from all of them. Fortunately, I was able to get some good feedback and was able to polish up my applications for submission to seven programs ranging from top tier down to fourth tier. Again, I received rejections across the board, bringing my two-year total to ten. This was the most difficult year because the first time around I didn't really know what I was doing, wasn't fully committed to the process, and hadn't spent as much time as I should have on the applications, but this second year I had worked hard to rethink my interests, hone my application to a fine point, and had even met with a professor, all for naught. In retrospect, this series of rejections was very painful, but I decided to make one last-ditch effort at applying to graduate schools. So, I stopped working, travelled to meet with professors, took courses, read and researched, asked everyone I knew to read over my statement of purpose, and then almost destroyed my long-term relationship to go develop my language skills. The payoff for this herculean effort was, out of nine applications, five outright rejections, three unfunded offers, and a single funded MA offer at a state school below the top fifty. Once again, the litany of rejections was a damaging blow, but that one glorious funded acceptance, even if just for a MA, fueled my hopes. By this point, I had received fifteen rejections in three years and three unfunded offers (which were basically rejections), versus one solid offer. Two years later, as my MA was drawing to a close, while taking a full course load, doing language training, teaching, retaking the GRE, contacting POIs, and writing a thesis, I scrambled to pull together another series of applications, again for nine schools. In breaking with my previous experiences, however, in addition to four rejections, I received five PhD offers, four of them from top-ten schools. However, to get there I had to endure nineteen rejection letters. In short: 1) if getting a PhD in history is really, REALLY what you want to do, then don't let the rejections discourage you. 2) A rejected application is not a judgment on or rejection of you; it is merely a statement that at that particular point the department's short-term needs and yours are misaligned. 3) The process can obviously be painful and maddening, so keep track of those who care about you and don't be afraid to lean on them. 4) When dealing with bad news, I recommend a good drunk, preferably cursing out the offending department to your friends over shots, and then waking up early in the morning to start studying again. 5) If you find yourself striking out this year and want to try again, be sure to contact the department's that you applied to asking for information on the decision, i.e. shortcomings and areas for improvement. Not all will answer, and you don't want to seem incredulous, but an earnest and humble request will often yield solid responses on what you can do to improve your application.
  20. A note to everyone waiting for results: Take a minute right now to go for a walk, take a bath, hug the person you love, play with your dog, whatever it is that reminds you of the beauty in this world. The wait is the hardest part, but it's almost over. And whatever the results for you are, your life will go on to be rich and fulfilling. Take a breath, relax, and good luck to all!
  21. I think that how you decide to take notes is a very personal thing that can only be determined through trial and error. I tend to write brief summaries of arguments, with each sub-chapter getting a sentence, each chapter a paragraph, etc. It generally turns out to about two single-spaced pages for a monograph and I like it because it makes it quick and easy to track down precise pages for references as well as to grasp the overall argument and how it's supported. I know other people who prefer to rewrite specific quotes that they find important, being sure to be accurate and provide page numbers for future reference; this seems especially useful in seminar discussions. Other people tend to take notes of their own musings and thoughts about books. Still others combine all three, with summaries interspersed with quotations and interjections of their own thoughts in parentheses. They're all good options because they work for the people doing them. In short, experiment with different styles before/as you get to grad school and figure out what works for you.
  22. This article may help: https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/ As you can see, teaching and administration are the bulk of the time commitments. Unless you are tenured at a top tier research institution, a preciously small amount of your time will be spent on research.
  23. The best advice I've received about publishing is to only do so if you are absolutely ready to have your name on a piece of work. Remember, while publishing is a fancy line on your CV, the content will be accessible to any future hiring committees for the rest of your life.
  24. Also look at Harvard's History of Capitalism program.
  25. RevolutionBlues

    Harvard

    If anyone is definitely sure that Harvard is not the place for them, those of us on the wait list would appreciate a speedy decline. Thank you
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