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I'm not really sure what you mean by "military affairs" in this context. I'm guessing something to do with contemporary US military operations? My point was that there's a world of military history that doesn't relate specifically to the US military and/or what it's up to at any given moment, so I'm not sure how that's relevant. For what it's worth I don't work specifically on military history, but I'm in a small department which has several and my understanding of the subject is based in a large part on my exposure to their work and methods.

If anything I think some of the advisers who have lots of students can make better ones. They have lots of experience training and placing students and not only tend to have a really great plan for you to follow, but a whole network of advisee children who can help you out on the market. They also have reason to stick around campus more rather than jet off on sabbatical or whatever, since they need to be available to their students more often. I should add that some of these same points (with the glaring exception of the latter) also accrue to older advisers with lots of experience and former students.

My sense is that faculty want to relate to grad students as if they're junior faculty moreso than students, especially when you get to the stage when you're teaching (which at some institutions could be right away). A gaping generational divide and lack of professional experience can really hinder that, I think. No offense, but even if you're the world's most brilliant 22 year old history student, you're still 22, and probably lack some of the wisdom that comes with living out in the working world after college - and it's that wisdom that shapes one's adult mentality as much (if not more) than one's academic prowess. They're also looking for people with a more developed sense of purpose in grad school, which means they won't stick around so long begging for extra funding while they search for a project. Hence the enthusiasm for taking masters students who have not only thought about the research question they plan to pursue as a PhD, but may even come with teaching experience to boot. I don't see a downside to you taking a year off - I get that you might feel like there's nothing you'd rather do than stay in school, and that it's annoying to find a job in the interim, but you're going to have to prepare for it anyway, as plenty of people don't get admitted to an institution in their first round of applications, even if they don't have the "straight from undergrad" handicap. And if you plunge into a PhD for the next 7-10 years, how would you ever know if you'd have preferred to work doing something else?

Agreed; I'm not sure any of this hurts, but you may want to categorize these things in a way that makes it clear you realize that these do not count as professional accolades in the discipline of history. For the workshops, I'd try to find a way to tie them to the "presentism" issue as well (maybe mention this in your personal statement somehow?) If it helps, when I made up my CV I included articles that had been published in print magazines but none that had only been published online or on blogs. The thing I'd lean most against including would be the community service awards, but even they might have some relevance (demonstrating willingness to perform service or something).

I would advise you to take at least a year off between college and graduate school in either case. You need some perspective on what life is like outside of school to make a serious choice about whether you want to go and, increasingly, I think admissions committees are making admissions choices on this basis as well. Someone coming straight from undergrad is an increasingly rare PhD student profile these days.

Not all military historians study recent US history: ones who are active at my school study Germany and ancient Rome, for example. I'm not so sure those fine distinctions will matter for the OP if applying to work with such people or in a field other than military history. And even if a department is very left wing, they may not hold military experience or ties against an applicant. Quite a few departments are known for being generally if not radically leftist and still admit PhD students with military backgrounds year after year. After all, applicants with military backgrounds may have good language training, experience working abroad, leadership skills that might translate well to teaching and the heightened possibility of placement into some sort of academy or war college - and I do think departments think ahead to placement advantages to some extent when making admissions decisions.

One issue to keep in mind is that schools will want to see some sort of evaluation of prior performance in graduate school, even if it wasn't in history. I went to law school before my PhD and included a letter from a law professor (who had a history MA but not a PhD). I still got in one place. It may have hurt me at others, though. If I had had the opportunity I would have definitely tried to include an additional letter from a historian, covering all my bases.

Definitely very tricky to answer, because the best funding opportunities for grad students/research aren't always the best in terms of employment. For example, doing German history will mean a lot of German government funds are available to you, but there are currently no German history jobs open on the market. I'd only really ask the question if there were specific fields one was having a hard time choosing between and needed a deciding factor, though. History just isn't a discipline in which it makes sense to do work in a given area for the primary purpose of chasing grant money - there won't be that much of it in any of them. The best way to reconcile an interest in history with a desire to make lots of money IMO is find a lucrative job with relatively limited hours (say in banking) that allows you to read a lot. Barring that, even being a freelance journalist who writes commercially targeted biographies of the Founding Fathers (even if only based on others' research!) could leave you much more financially successful than a professional historian.

I can't speak for other places, but outside field requirements only exist for Americanists at my school, and a statistics sequence will only meet the language requirement for people who opt to quit their PhD and get a terminal MA - so I wouldn't make too many assumptions about being able to use these assets everywhere. Unless you have your heart set on doing some kind of anthropologically-informed history, you might be better off getting deeper into history and emerging with a better sense of what course of research you would pursue in grad school (or accumulating the other skills you would need to pursue it). Even if you wind up at a school with outside field requirements, this can't hurt you.

Most lucrative? You mean in terms of salary? You're in the wrong field.

I don't think it's likely GRE scores will disqualify you from Harvard if they haven't disqualified you from, say, NYU - and that's what they're primarily used for in the admissions process, to cull applications that obviously don't belong off the top. It would probably be other factors that would mean you were less likely to be admitted to Harvard than any of the schools here, most of them specific to your interests and achievements within them. As for McGill - yes, you will have to do a potentially costly MA to begin with, then face the prospect of an unfunded PhD as well.

Yes, there are schools that automatically forward applications, but they tend to forward them to their general humanities MA programs. For example, Chicago may offer you a place in its MAPH program, or NYU in the Draper program. Other schools allow you to check a box on your PhD application that will give you the option of having the application forwarded. I second jenste's advice to look into each school individually to see how they do this.

It's kind of on the long side unfortunately - we began the third week of August and go til deep into May - but yes, my girlfriend and I are looking forward to the breaks. Summer's a new obstacle though since research/language related travel will take me even further away, so I guess we will have to figure out a way to minimize that without compromising my work. Of course we'd love to be living in the same place, but I kind of get the sense that by the time she figures out what she's doing, I'll almost be at dissertation phase anyway, and can hopefully wind up closer to her instead. Ithaca itself hasn't turned out to be that bad - it's really the isolation that's most annoying. Since it can't be airlifted closer to NYC, all I can do is pray some transportation company realizes that there's a huge market for travel between the two and provide a better service. Currently, there's the option of a normal bus at "only" $88 round trip (that's with the weekend student discount) that takes 6+ hours to do the trip each way, and an unnecessarily luxe Cornell-owned bus that does it in 4 - for a whopping RT cost of $160+. If anyone here feels like abandoning your PhD to become an entrepreneur, there's a huge number of people waiting for some competitor to roll in and provide the option everyone wants: a low-frills bus that does the trip direct for a reasonable price.

I'd be curious to know if the categories different universities place history in result in different pressures to justify hiring decisions/research grants that shape their character. For example, I know Cornell considers history one of the humanities, but Chicago places it within its social sciences division. Has anyone noticed differences in the output of institutions under similarly distinct umbrellas, or know if there's a causal link between these categorizations and the ways these departments operate?

Harvard maybe? Also, last I heard Toronto was the only Canadian school that fully funded PhD students, so I'd keep that in mind when applying to McGill.

I was told point blank by a program that one more prof being on leave in the year after I was applying would have resulted in rejection, so I'm not sure you can necessarily count on rotating sabbaticals. One's prospective advisor being away in one's first year can be okay, but when there are a completely insufficient number of people to provide you with classes or mentoring in your first year, the year before may not be the best time to apply. Likewise, if a prospective advisor is away during the year you apply, he/she might not be able to get a word in to support you. I would use leave information strategically to decide when to apply or at least what schools to avoid throwing application fees at uselessly.

More realtalk: as a Europeanist, you will be expected to know at least French and German by the time you take your oral/comp exams. As someone who wants to study the French Revolution, you should probably have a proficient command of French going into your PhD program. That is, unless you're only studying the response to the French Revolution in some other country - in which case that country's language assumes the greatest importance in your application - but even still, French will play a significant role. Of course, as annieca mentions, when historians speak about "knowing languages" they generally only mean reading knowledge (sometimes defined as loosely as "being able to get this with the help of a dictionary"), in order to understand primary source documents. BUT as a scholar of the French revolution, expected to travel to France and attend French conferences, I would expect that you would have to attain some greater proficiency in spoken French as well.

Canadiensfan: Your first project sounds like it might fit in well at schools with strong history of science programs. I think New England Nate would be able to cover this a little better, but I know Cornell, Princeton, and Harvard (in the latter case, History of Science is a separate PhD program) have good ones. You may also want to think about American Studies or History of American Civilizations programs that might let you work on more expansive or interdisciplinary projects. As to your second question, I would apply as widely as possible. Find the programs with both the best narrow and broad fits and see where you get in. Admissions can be a crapshoot and you may not wind up with the choices you'd expect. As for your third question, see the discussion above about applying with two different projects in mind that are vaguely within the same general field. I did this in my application on the assumption that it wouldn't look good to have recommenders talk up one focus area if I claimed I would go in another in an application to some schools, but I think it hurt me. The best thing to do might be to make absolutely sure you're on the same page as your recommenders so that nothing they say will "give away" that you've applied to different schools with different foci in mind. kenningsa: Programs usually have restrictions on the length of writing samples they'll accept. I think the shortest I encountered when I was applying was 20 pages. I don't think a slightly shorter sample will hurt you if its contents are good. That said, I was really taken aback by how much people at the program I was admitted to considered my writing sample indicative of the topic I'd eventually pursue in grad school. You might want to make absolutely clear in your SOP that you intend to move in another direction and use the opportunity to talk up how your research on French history has prepared you to research Haiti in a unique way.

Honestly, to me history's ambivalent status vis a vis the humanities and social sciences is what makes history attractive. I love the range of methodologies that are available...and it doesn't hurt that history is (usually) respected both by social scientists and literary theorists.

General reputational opinion tends to correlate pretty highly with the US News rankings. W&M is ranked 36. I'd be at least as concerned with its standing in your subfield though.

Your application (both now and for your PhD in the future) will definitely need to find a way to explain that your poor performance during study abroad was influenced by factors other than your failure to deal with the situation in the country where you were studying, which could make it seem like you're not up to the task. If possible, get one of more of your profs to corroborate this fact in their LORs. I would also start taking modern Turkish as soon as possible. Ottoman Turkish, which you will need to know, will require you to know both Turkish and Arabic as prerequisites, but requires a more advanced level of Turkish than Arabic, which primarily contributed its alphabet and a few loanwords.

We're registering already! It does feel topsy-turvy, given I haven't had the chance to talk to anyone about what, precisely, I should be studying at this point (especially significant given most of the teaching here is done on a one-on-one tutorial basis), nor do I feel like I know exactly which levels of language courses I should be enrolled in without taking assessment tests, nor has the department even published its official graduate rules! I guess it doesn't even matter right now, given I had a registration hold placed on me for not submitting a form I didn't even know about because it turned out half the university's emails to me were routing to the spam filter of an email address I didn't even know to check. I haven't had to go so far as figuring out my advisor yet - unless there are even more places emails might be hiding - but I definitely remember attending students asking me about this (or my committee) as early as admitted students weekend. Thanks for your thoughts on the urban/rural situation - they're comforting. My biggest problem now (as a poor PhD studen) is that transportation to the city costs an arm and a leg to use often, more than twice as much at best as the cost of bus transit between Boston and New York (the same distance). And my gf is now seriously contemplating moving two hours+ further east on Long Island to do a masters at Stony Brook, which would mean an even longer/more difficult commute to nowhere particularly interesting. Sigh...the "two body problem" commences!

My thought would be that either genocide or environment could be combined with French colonial history in a way that makes sense (though genocide might be the harder one here without making some controversial claims off the bat!) but admitting an interest in all three at once might be too much. p.s. When are historians going to stop calling Atlantic history "nascent"? It's been around since the 50s and popular since the 80s! (not at all a dig at you, jamc8383, it seems to be a discipline-wide convention).

I considered doing that when I applied, but the problem was that I worried I might also have to ask my recommenders to prepare separate letters for each school, in the event they planned to reference my interests - otherwise a mismatch might make it look like I wasn't really on the same page as them. And not only would that have placed more of a burden on them, it ran the risk of making my recommenders think I wasn't sure where my true interests would lie, as well - meaning they might take me less seriously and be less inclined to provide a (good) recommendation when I approached them. In retrospect, I wonder if these concerns were overwrought (in which case I'm going to feel pretty stupid about failing to increase my chances of admission at more schools) but I've seen others note that one should be wary of applying to schools with completely tailored interests for similar reasons.

Not sure how you plan to fit these subject areas together in your SOP, but they seem kind of broad and disparate to me? Even if you can find faculty focusing on all three in the places you're applying, you don't want to come off too unfocused. I haven't confirmed this, but reassessing my application from last year I have the feeling that saying I was interested in modern European history as a whole and then naming potential projects in two somewhat different areas of the field may have been fatally unspecific for some adcoms - even though it came off as more focused than the fields you've listed here.