The gleaming path of the law beckons you all. That path is paved with such wonderful intentions......
No, no, no. Don't you realize the only sane, financially-prudent decision is applying to grad school in history where you can live the high life for 6, 7, 8, 12 years before stepping forth into the professoriate where jobs are guaranteed and you never have to do committee work.
"In other news, earlier today an assistant professor of History at an upstate New York college was blasted by lightning. Witnesses noted that the lightning came out of a clear blue sky and seemed to follow immediately upon his having submitted a message to a soccer-based website. In related news, college officials unexpectedly announced there will be delays in the searches for two liberal arts faculty position, final acceptance letters to incoming History students, History fellowship and teaching assistantship assignments, and the Fall Town-and-Gown-a-palooza."
My other consideration was grad school for history at Berkeley. However, you need to know at least two extra languages to do the PhD. I could do 1.5, but neither were in my field. So I would have had to learn Latin and Greek from scratch. Not a prospect I overly relished.
Not sure how I missed this thread, especially with all the familiar names. I also fall into the amateur historian category, or maybe dilettante is more accurate. There was always a strong interest in history in my family, but what really set me off was a scheduling conflict during my sophmore year of high school. I was forced into non-college-track US History class, and it took the teacher about 15 minutes to figure out that what he was teaching was a waste of time for me, so we conjured up an independant study course. I would select a dozen or so topics in US history and submit papers on each of them. The only ones I remember were the Mexican War (or as the Mexicans called it, the War Against the North Americas), and the Civil War in the Southwest. In college I took courses in midieval European and Asian history, as well as one on the history of Islam before the Ottomans arrived. Since then, I've hopped from topic to topic mostly because of a particular book catching my eye. Reading a pair of historical fantasies by Guy Gavriel Kay got me interested in the Byzantine Empire, so I'm another John Julius Norwich fan. A morbid fascination with disease led me to Rats, Lice & History by Hans Zinsser, and Plagues and Peoples by WH McNeil. A desire to understand the religious side of America inspired me to buy Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America by Martin Marty. More later, probably.
Kay wrote about the Byzantine Empire? Did not know that. If you want another pretty good book on Byzantium, I'd suggest Ostrogorsky. I like his work.
I am a history buff too. Absolutely love the stuff, but cast my lot with something to make money in college (engineering). I'm mostly interested in Western History with most of my interest since the renaissance. I like military history and have read mostly about events since the American Revolution. Right now I'm reading several books about Ben Franklin, John Waugh's the Class of 1846 (West Point class), and Dean Atcheson's Present at the Creation. It's fascinating to me to see the pressures on the person making the decision and how they were able to deal with all of the conflicting issues and reach the conclusions that they did. One of my favorite things is books like Five Days in May, 1940, where there is a great deal of discussion not only of the decisions that were being taken in Churchill's cabinet, but the behind-the-scenes action by which Churchill convinced the cabinet to back him (it was a much closer thing than a lot of histories teach).