Could anyone please give me the nuts and bolts of how long and what to do in getting a master’s degree in history and then a doctorate as in how much you study, how long it takes, the dissertion, etc.?
There’s ‘degree in history’ and there’s ‘useful degree in history’. I think the important thing is to think about what area you’d like to study and then how to get into a good program you can afford. And make sure you speak a second language or well on your way. Also consider research – you may be unemployed if you just want to be a professor. (:
I’ve wanted to be a history writer writing books and conducting research, possibly as a freelancer rather than as a professor. Can that work?
You’re not going to make a lot of money writing history books, unless you’re an exceptional writer and have a topic of pretty wide interest. No one outside of academia is going to pay you for doing research for the sake of research.
writing texbooks (even for primary and secondary school students,) being a permanent contributor to a weekly or monthly publication, and then teaching.
four years undergraduate degree, need not be related, figure two years for a masters, need not be related. Four years course work for PhD and figure 1 to 2 years to write a thesis.
I’m presuming that you are literate in more than one language, it will be very useful to you doing any kind of graduate work. You are at an age where language will be much easier now to learn than at any time in your future. If I were in your shoes, which I’m not, I’d consider Mandarin or Spanish. Your English is good enough in writing to pass at a very proficient level as a native speaker. If it is a second language, you don’t need to study it more for history purposes, you’ve more than got it down.
I’d caution about getting all these degrees in history. History is about looking at what is available as a source and to a degree, what is not available and what that may mean. So don’t focus too narrowly. My best history professor was a PhD in Philology (Mortimer Chambers). I don’t know if he is still alive and/or teaching, I’d imagine he’d be in his 90s. This was at UCLA.
The very best histories were written by Thucydides and Winston Churchill (in my usual not so humble opinion). They are still flawed works. Most other great historical writers known to the public were not PhDs in history. Harry Turtledove of alternate history fame is a PhD in history if memory serves me correctly. Met him once at one of Prof. Chamber’s parties.
Ultimately you need to decide what you want to do and ignore the advice of people like me. But I’ve read your stuff on SD and while I don’t agree with all of it, you have more potential than anyone else posting on this board and more opportunities due to your age. A history PhD and writing books might be aiming a bit low for you, and I apologize if it is none of my business. A good grounding in history is necessary for the kinds of things you are interested in. Have you considered being a diplomat?
Best wishes.
Only if you want to study the history of China or Spain. Historians generally need a reading knowledge of German and/or French, as there are lots of significant secondary sources in those languages. Note that you need to be able to read articles, not argue in the subway: it’s not required that a person be fluent, but you do have to master academic language. This isn’t easier or more difficult than fluency, but it’s different. If you want to study ancient history, you need a reading knowledge of whatever primary sources you will be dealing with: real histories do not get written by people reading translations, and in any case, translations often don’t exist.
You don’t need a degree, much less a doctorate, to do that, FWIW.
I am actually in the midst of this process. I have a BS and MA in history. I just finished all of my qualifying exams for the PhD and got my dissertation prospectus approved.
I addition to what everyone else has said I’ll just throw out two thoughts.
Firstly, while any PhD program I know of will require you to demonstrate knowledge of a foreign language, actual language skills vary. In my experience, most historians of the United States never use their foreign languages and have minimal mastery at best. Even some of the scholars of other areas freely admit that while they can read other languages fairly well they have tremendous difficulty conversing in them.
Secondly, if you do not want to be a professor, an alternative career path is public history which concentrates on archival or museum work. You can get a PhD specifically in public history. One example is here
http://www.mtsu.edu/publichistory/phd/PhD_Program_Home.shtml
This is not true in my experience. Aside from historians actually studying France or Germany or areas connected to them (such as Vietnam) I have never met a scholar who can read those languages. Spanish is a far more common language among the historians I have known over the years. I also don’t see many references to secondary literature in German or French. Most of the scholarship I hear people discuss is published in English.
I am located in the US and mostly deal with historians of the United States, I realize other parts of the world might be a different matter altogether.
I deal with medievalists and classicists, mostly, and they use their German and French regularly: tons of scholarship in those fields were done in those languages, and even if modern works are more often in English, if you are writing your dissertation on Merovingian France, lots of your sources will be 25-50 years old. My understanding is that this was true for most fields outside American history, which is why the foreign language requirement exists.
Qin, if you’re seriously considering this route I would really recommend it for you (and I wouldn’t recommend it to most). Your grasp of history far surpasses that of most educated 40-somethings, and you seem very devoted to the subject. If you want, you could always get a degree in a “fallback” subject, like accounting or engineering or something safe, and then pursue this as your dream.
I would also agree with Manda Jo that if you want to study history pre-mid-20th century, tons of literature and sources are in either French or German. I have a vague idea that French is more common from, say, 1000 AD (I suppose this would be Old French)-1600ish, and then German becomes more common till mid 1900s. Could be wrong on that, though.
Yes it can work. Many popular history books, including major works on many subjects, are written by people who have had formal training in history and chosen not to go into academia. As a percentage of the whole, however, I’d say that the majority of such books are written by actual working academics.
The question is not whether this is possible but what would work for you. Given your personal history you might be wise not to go into the standard academic career, meaning teaching and contact with students as you work your way up the ladder. Writing is a better, more individual and more solitary, profession for many people, and I include myself.
I have training in the social sciences but I’ve been a working writer my whole adult life even while making a living doing other things. You can start writing at any time and see how successful you are at it, and let that guide your future plans. It is more difficult to be accepted without the credentials of degrees and a school affiliation, but many academics can’t write for beans so a good writer has some advantages.
Qin, after your PHD, have you considered going the TV route? There are plenty of TV history programs and they all need researchers and commentators, and if you’re telegenic, you could get bumped to presenter.
I will happily concede that language skills for non US historian might be more important than I realize. As I mentioned, I mostly work with historians of the United States so I probably have some bias.
However, it is certainly possible to become a successful historian (at least of the US) with only minimal foreign language skills.
On another matter, it certainly is possible to write history without a PhD. Many of my favorite historical works were written by professional writers rather than scholars. I am a big fan of Shelby Foote in particular.
Some of the best works even in academic history come from scholars in other disciplines such as Elliot Gorn who has a PhD in American Studies. Larry Berman’s background is in political science.
Of U.S. history, yes. But I’d have real doubts about any Ph.d program in European/Medieval/Classical history that treated the foreign language requirement as a checkbox instead of an essential skill you needed to do the job. It’s hard to imagine a reading list for anything in those areas that was entirely in English. But again, you don’t need to be able to speak French or German, you just need to be able to stumble through the scholarship in your own sweet time.
And remember, if you specialize in a history that requires foreign languages, you also get to spend your sabbaticals in places that require foreign languages!
No advice but I wish you luck. I had always wanted to pursue a phd in history. I ended up with a bachelor’s degree in history. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the stress/time involved.
Correct about the languages-- PhD in medieval history here, now teach Ancient History (and Latin occasionally). My route: 4 years for a BA with distinction, history major, music minor; 1 year at my first grad school, not a good mix with my advisor, so started over again at a new grad school. 2.5 years to get the MA (medieval history), about 4 years or so to get the PhD (medieval history as main focus, outside fields in Roman Empire, Latin, and Latin paleography.)
About the sources – yer, we do have to know the older scholarship, but new stuff is coming out all the time, some of which refutes that scholarship, so one can’t get by exclusively on older works without demonstrating knowledge of leading-edge work (unless it’s a neglected part of the field that needs revision.) A quick look through the current ‘books received’ in the back of current classical and medieval journals reveals that much scholarship in these fields is still coming out in German, French, Italian – with no forthcoming translation. )
My grad school required (for my field) oral exams/comps at the MA level and PhD level; demonstration of reading proficiency in three languages set by your advisor based on your field - I had to do French, German, and Latin, as many older sources are in German especially, and since I worked with a Carolingian specialist, I needed the French. Latin goes without saying. I was expected for my dissertation, however, to be able to slog through sources in European languages with aid of a dictionary, so saying that I could use a source because it was in Spanish or Dutch or Italian or whatever didn’t wash.
Manda JO is also correct in her other post that we don’t have to speak these languages, just read them, and a lot of grad schools will have intensive courses in Reading German, Reading French. The only correction I’d make her to your comment, MJ, is that we were expected to be able to read quickly and with high comprehension; the language tests I took were not only timed, but judged on how far we got in the passage, and the correctness of translation. You need to be able to hack and slash your way through a lot of reading quickly, and don’t have the luxury of going slowly, alas. ::shakes fists at long-winded 19th century German scholars::
That said, the PhD folks doing US history did not have the same language recs. So language requirements vary. I ended up teaching myself Greek simply because I teach so many ancient history related topics now, and it’s not required of medievalists unless they decide to specialise in Coptic or Byzantine history.
All that said, I got my ‘proper’ professoring job teaching the history of rock because of a recommendation of a colleague of a colleague. The job market is tough, and even as a professor you might not be able to write the sorts of history books you would like.
I meet plenty of accomplished, knowledgeable historians at conferences who are not professors or have PhDs; you can be an independent scholar and work at another profession by day. Having a PhD doesn’t necessarily give you respect and gravitas; waving around a high-quality repro gladius, on the other hand, has been ever so helpful for me.
missed edit window – saying I COULDN’T read a language was no excuse for not including a source, sorry.
If only I could read English, that would also be ever so helpful.