Writing sample from the field of History??

[bguis]

I've noticed that most of the programs I'm looking at specify the writing sample should be related to your desired research, which makes perfect sense.  My question, is would an essay that is an analytical look at a painting, written through the lens of history (i.e. considering the social expectations of the time and what the implications of the painting would have been), be considered a "history" essay?  For some reason I always worry when my work brings in art or literature I always struggle with the question of are they actually historical research.

[Concordia]

You're interpreting evidence and putting it into some kind of framework.  I don't have a PhD or serve on an admissions committee, but that sounds like a decent start-- as long as you're not billing yourself as a quant-oriented Marxian or something quite different.  Maybe look at some essays on microhistory for inspiration.

I just completed a master's thesis based on an under-discovered journal, and needed to dig up a fair bit of biographical data to have a lot of it make sense.  In order to convince a method-oriented department that I wasn't "just writing biography," I stressed that I was undertaking a microhistorical approach that would allow a slower and deeper look at an event that normally gets glossed over.  Enables one to re-examine facts that might be over-emphasized or misunderstood in some accounts, think about questions of causation/agency, the broader nature of political affiliation in that period, etc.

Edited September 29, 2016 by Concordia

[TMP]

Ask the professors who are writing your letters; they know better.