New England Nat

It's really more about PoI than about particular schools. Find someone that fits your work. Off the top of my head I would think about Sara Pritchard at Cornell http://sts.cornell.edu/people/sbp65.cfm or Gabrielle Hecht at UMich http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hechtg/ . Pritchard is more environmental history and Hecht more history of science/technology but both are historians of modern France and the French empire. Hecht's the Radiance of France is perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of scholarship I've ever read. The other option is finding a program that has both good French scholars and good environmental history. Given that I would be very careful about Wisconsin at the moment I think it's hard to find a better up and coming place to do environmental history than Davis is at the moment and that department is in better shape than you would think given that they are at the UC schools. If you are open to a masters to build to a better PhD application there is Rutgers-Newark/NJIT which offers a history of technology, the environment and medicine concentration. Their environmental historian is more 20th century but their historian of technology is somewhere around the low end of your range. Look for the science/techy/enviro people on the NJIT website and the traditional historians at the Rutgers side. And depending on how you position yourself as an environmental historian I would also consider the history of science programs which tend to be concentrated in the Ivys.

I wouldn't call it a "horror", more that it is kind of a quark of the book. It was the required text for my French for Reading course at Princeton, and my sister's French for reading course at UPenn.

It's also worth warning that the book has a lot of science related reading passages. It's fairly obviously originally written way back in the ice ages for teaching languages to scienceymath types. It's been the standard book for teaching french for reading to graduate students for fourty years. My sister and I used it at two different institutions 15 years appart.

What other's have said, but I think it's worth emphasizing the problem with the "cash cow" masters from places like Columbia and Chicago. I'm sure there are some people who have wonderful experiances from them, but I've heard a great many bitter stories from people who went through those programs. The usual story is that the professors are not particularly invested in the masters students and in the context of the shadow of a large PhD program a masters student can get lost. I have a terminal masters, and I think it was quite valuable, but I got it from a program that does not grant PhDs. IMHO, you are thinking in a good way with this history/literature masters because a masters should do something a PhD program either can't or doesn't do. So a masters in public history before a phd in a more traditional program is a solid credential. My masters is in a field that my PhD granting institution doesn't do. I have used it to grain a specialist credential.

For those of you with a car I would advocate living off campus. If you go between eight and twelve miles south of Princeton into Trenton and it's suburbs of Lawrenceville and Hamilton you can get substantially lower rent. This is especially important given the temporary shortage in university owned housing stock that will happen over the next year or two. They are taking down one of the existing grad student housing structures and will be building new ones. Parking is free on campus if you qualify, just bring a copy of your lease into the parking office. THere is a massive divide between the grad students and the undergrads made I think more accute by the fact that there is relatively less teaching done by Princeton grad students. The likelyhood of the same undergrad having the same preceptor (TA) in more than one class is basically nil in most departments. Grad students tend to see them as privelaged and isolated (there are jokes about it), while they see us as mysterious creatures. Last september the opening issue of the Daily Princetonian advocated "talking to a grad student" as one of the not to be missed opportunities to the freshman. The tourists I think is the most shocking thing, and they get much more pronounced over the summer. In the late 1960s a Japanese photographer took a well known series of pictures of Ivy League students and it apparently carries some sort of weird cache in Asia so there are often tour groups of 50 or a 100 wandering around the historic parts of campus. At first you try to avoid walking in their pictures and than you just give up because you do have to get places. I wouldn't say the undergrads being missing in the summer is unnoticeable, but it's nothing like other college towns I have lived in. This is not a town that looses the majority of it's population in the summer and since most of the undergrads don't live off campus it really has very little effect on the town itself.

I'd really recommend Holly Brewer's By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. It's five years old, but describes the birth of the social definition of childhood. To continue the depressing theme. Hendrick Hartog's Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age is just an amazing piece of work and came out in Feburary. A lot more people should be reading it across disciplines. I was amazed that it wasn't in the book room at the history of medicine conferencce this year because it should have been.

It all kind of depends on how crazy my life is and I figured I'd wait until the next set of applicants started posting. That and it saves me from my pile of legal documents from the 1980s I should have been reading today.

I had the opposite experiance with Rosetta Stone and I did it in French as a refresher. I had not used my french in three years through my masters and my senior year of undergrad.

Just as a heads up you should totally apply to Princeton. That sounds like a wonderful marriage of someone Dirk Hartog, Margot Canaday and Kevin Kruse would be interested in, and we just hired in latino history someone whose job talk was about linguistics and citizenship.

Just to chime in and suggest that you should consider a reach school or two that you don't consider a great fit. I applied to Princeton thinking it wasn't a great fit and thought I would't get in and that's where I went. It turns out the admissions committees know pretty well, and often better than you do, what is a great fit for their programs. I ended up applying to about 8 places and had "good fits" and "ok fits" all over my personal ranking. I totally had my heart set on a particular PoI and it blinded me that I was a horrible fit there. The other thing to remember is that a lot of the Ivy's have been hiring lately (read poaching) senior scholars from the great public universities. We hired five professors this year, two of them with tenure and I don't even know what happened with the Center for Gender and Sexuaity job that they were also looking at historians for.... they're not on our website at all yet. And the most obvious fit for me when I was in cycle was a recent senior hire who wasn't on the website either during my cycle. As for my advise on the SoP... I would suggest if at all possible trying to describe how you came to your research interest, not just as personal narrative but as thought process. Explain the germ of your idea about your research interest. Don't be afraid to have strong ideas. I started out describing a moment in my process as an undergrad where I was going to do something completely different and the world changed how I think of things. I was going to be a geologist and Katrina disillusioned me about a great many things about science.

I'm going to put out my offer again for those of you who are going to Princeton visits next week that if you show up early I'm happy to give unofficial tours of campus with geeky historical facts before they try to get you drunk on Sunday night.

I wouldn't worry too much about that Osirus, everyone knows perspective students are nervous as hell

I wouldn't worry about reading over the summer too much, if you have contact with particular graduate students in your department you can ask them what they recommend. I could probably tell incoming Princeton students which books on the HIS 500 reading will be a bitch to try and do in a week for class but other than that... and those common books are very particular to departments. As for funding for language it depends on the unviersity. Princeton does fund summer language beforehand, others dont'. It's one of the nicer things about being rich.

Nice jeans and a blouse or jacket works for most places. For those of you planning a Princeton visit I am going to warn you up front, this is a very dressy department and I wouldn't nessecarily say you have to wear a suit... but for the love of god don't wear a tshirt (unless it's like a tshirt blouse women can get away with).

There is also some social value in making sure that you pass the first language exam you have to take. In some departments (and it's likely impossible to figure that out before you get there) faculty will see failure to immediately pass a language as a sign that you haven't prepared. Americanists will often have different feelings on this, far from everyone. I'm taking a second language the summer between my first and second year but it's the completely new language as opposed to the one I just needed to brush up on.

And one of those glow lights to ward off seasonal effective disorder.

I did try to warn people the NYU process drives everyone crazy.

You are making me glad that at least it is standardized in my department.

I have the exact opposite experiance with professional soldiers. I treat them with respect and demonstrate as best as I can that I want to treat their profession fairly and they respond with integrity. They are intrigued that an academic historian who doesn't have military experiance is trying to understand what they have to contribute to larger society. Perhaps it helps that I am not writing about battles or logistics or even really in the "war and society" school. But yes it does help to lean to deal with the buzz words and acronyms.

I have a family member who is faculty at Stony Brook, and I've spent a lot of time there. Most of their students (and most of their faculty) commute a fair distance. There is an LIRR stop right on campus.

Terrace still has open membership. I'm just mostly offering a familiarization tour. No one needs to haze them until they have signed their contracts I just know I and a lot of my cohort got lost because they gave the crappiest maps and no campus tours last year.

Goldie has reminded me of an offer I intended to make... Anyone who is going to show up in Princeton with some time to spare before the first events of the visiting days want a 3 cent tour of the campus can PM me and we'll set up a time. I know the GHA going to offer people who arrive early grad students willing to have coffee ... but still

My program generally requires the translation of two passages, one with a bilingual dictionary and one without. As it is adminsitered and graded in the history department how hard or difficult it is can really be drastically different from one exam to another. Some times everyone will fail a given language exam and other times everyone will pass it. A real red flag can be if the person sitting the exam is a native speaker of the language, this is especially true when they have to reach out to other departments to find someone who speaks the language being tested. I wouldn't say it is being blown out of proportion, because the language exam can be a real anchor around the neck of a candidate. Don't try and worry about it too much, but do prepare for it.

I understand from my significant other who is Canadian that Canada Post is even worse than USPS.

The Air Force Historical Office employs a lot of historians writing largely classified histories. The other services much less so. This is the reason why I do not call myself a military historian except after listing two or three other subfields first.