Would you help me out with some grad school advice? I have some specific questions below.

After a lot of thought and some interviewing of friends-with-PhDs, I’ve decided to pursue and interdisciplinary PhD at a particular University outside of the US. It’s not in the top ten schools in that country, but it is in the top twenty - and it’s ideal for my situation for a host of other reasons.

However, the path to take between here and there is still murky to me. That’s where my questions come up.

Who I am: I’m in my early 40s and have these degrees so far: 

• a 2006 BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Social Sciences (this was in an interdisciplinary program in which history was never the focus but was generally included in some form)
• a 2013 MDiv in ministry (in which I took some history classes)

Before getting my masters, I worked mostly in politics. Since completing my MDiv, I’ve been working as a minister.

The interdisciplinary PhD that I want to pursue includes History and some mix of Anthropology, Education, and/or English. My plan is to do research around practical theology, racial identity, and gender roles in US history between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War.

So, my questions:

1. Would it make sense for me to apply directly to the PhD program, or to first get an MA in History? I do already have a masters, after all - but it’s a professional rather than academic one.
2. Since my masters is a professional one, I have no thesis or capstone to submit in my application. And my undergrad was awhile ago, so I’ve grown & changed a lot since then. Looking at the possible writing samples I could send, there’s basically just a research paper that I wrote from first-person interviews about a recent small-scale religious movement. I thought it came out okay, but would that be anywhere near adequate to demonstrate my writing/research ability for a History MA (let alone a PhD)?
3. Would it make sense for me to take a year to get a second BA - just so that I a) have a better writing sample to submit, b) have some dedicated study of History under my belt, and c) can research and submit a stronger proposal for what I’d like to study?

Is there some sort of historical reason why some feminist groups took a liking to neo-paganism, rather than just being atheists (or something else)? Was there some important figure or writer that influenced some feminists to be attracted to neo-pagan ideas? Or are there ideas within some pagan thought which could be considered feminist? (liberating, empowering, etc for women)

Basically; is there some historical reason why paganism became popular amongst some women/feminists?

I know that in hindsight we see that the Confederacy had terrible odds of winning the Civil War from a men and war material perspective, which makes me question if they expected any actual fighting? I wonder if they expected the Union to just let them leave or possibly fight one or two small skirmishes, and then fizzle out? Or even if they possibly thought that more states would secede with them and make a war an untenable option?

Overall, did the south really expect to fight the civil war for one reason or another?

Donald Knuth taught a course at Stanford on technical writing in the 80s. The course notes include the following quotation regarding introductions to books and how people always skip them:

As for those readers who do know how to study my composition, no author can accompany his book wherever it goes and allow only certain persons to study it. - Maimonides

However, there's no reference to where its from (or what translation) and I couldn't obviously find this passage on Wikiquote.

Is this a real quotation? If so, what, exactly, was Maimonides talking about? From other excerpts from the preface to The Guide for the Perplexed it seems like he might be saying "don't blame me if someone ignorant reads this and misunderstands what I'm saying," but I'm not quite sure.

Certainly seamen were a more diverse group, but were there ever non-white officers posted by the Admiralty? Or any Warrant Officers?

After listening to a Our fake History Podcast and reading up on it my self, I wonder has there been any significant evidence to support this claim? Did Archimedes design anything that remotely resembles what is being called a "death ray"?

I'm currently working on a term paper that deals with Sullas dictatorship and its relationship to the later crises of the Republic. Part of it will be the rise of Sulla to power and therefore also his relationship with Marius and the importance of the Marian reforms in respect to Sullas dictatorship later on.

While I have a lot of material on Sulla and his dictatorship (less so on the consequences and the judgement of his dictatorship by those who came after him unfortunately, but still enough for a term paper of 12-15 pages), material on Marius seems rather sparse so far, especially in the field I'm concerned with. There are some books and articles I found that deal with the military side of his reforms and how they affected the army, but I haven't been able to find an article or book that explicitely deals with the consequences those military reforms had on the political and societal landscape of the late Republic. The effects are often alluded to (soldiers being more loyal to their generals than to the Republic is one that often comes up) but they are mostly just mentioned with the understanding that they existed and not much else in terms of explanation or analysis.

So I'm wondering if I just missed something (probably) or if there actually is a lack of literature dealing with the analysis and exploration of the "civilian side" of the Marian reforms. Unfortunately, language-wise I'm limited to german and English, but maybe someonce can point me in the right direction or give me some hints on this.

Was White/Whiteness a concept that existed in Nazi Germany or did they view their racial identity different from that?

We've all heard of a "viking" grave which included a woman, but how did the non-warrior women in ancient Scandinavian culture get buried? What would a Norse woman that worked a farm while her husband was off looting monasteries look forward to after she died?

I have a lot of interest in reading about the history of the Soviet Union and World War 2, and one person from that time period I've always admired was Georgy K Zhukov. I've always felt he was the best "high level" general of the war, and deserved to be ranked up in history with other great generals. I also thought of him as a decent human being, at least for the standards of his time - some of the stuff I read says that he would often get in hot water for not toadying to Stalin and that he disliked the NKVD.

But when I was a kid learning about history, our classes would only mentioned him in passing as a random russian general. Alot of times when I read clickbait articles on the internet they claim his reputation is overblown and that he was evil incarnate and prop up some german generals or something as better than him (I'm always suspicious of this because Zhukov beat them in the end, plus they're propping up literal nazis).

So what's the deal? Is my opinion of Zhukov as a "master of mobile warfare on an operational and strategic level who also managed to be a decent human being in a tough time" wrong? Were my textbooks right to only mention him in passing? Can someone give me a rundown of the man and point to some good biographies of him? (Preferably in english or spanish)

Oh, there's also a minor question I have about him regarding submachine guns. I always thought he was a supporter of them and that the PPSh became a well loved weapon ( I don't know where I got the idea that he supported submachine guns though). But I recently saw a post on social media that claimed that he was opposed to the introduction of the PPZh. The post tried to frame it as him being a cheapskate and not caring enough about his troops to give them a newer model of submachine guns. This seemed ridiculous to me for a lot of reasons but when I tried to look up information on the PPZh I couldn't find any gun called that being introduced as an upgrade to the PPSh other than from an unsourced wiki. Was that story fabricated or did he really oppose an upgrade to the PPSh?

Thank you in advance! I know this post might have been rambling but I'm very curious about Mr Zhukov.

What was the life expectancy for the average peasant in the high-late medieval period? I read it's usually from mid twenties to thirties. Is that what the average person would expect to live until or is that the average because the child mortality rate was so high and plagues and famines were common?

The question above is intended to exclude the current controversy and is asking about previous US presidents. Thanks in advance for the answers!

An amputation wound would be massive, severing major veins and arterys, and likely done with dirty equipment. Why were they preferable to cleaning and bandaging the original wound?

Achilles is said to have dragged the corpse of Hector through the dust behind his chariot -- did the Greeks have any other use for chariots beyond elaborate gloating, and how did those uses change with time? References for the Greeks and Romans' employment of chariots would be most welcome!

Birch tar had been used as glue since Neolithic Age (p.e. Ötzi's arrow head), was used to seal clay vessels and boats, and was crucial in wine making due to its antibacterial effects, starting from 6000 BC. It was still used during the Roman Empire till about 200 AD. From then on, its use, especially in wine making, has vanished. Why is that so?

From everything I have seen so far about ethiopia, the only thing that made that Country survive that long and not being colonized was the fact that it was a Christian country.

For example: The help they recieved from Portugal in the Adal-Ethiopian war, or the help the recieved from Russia in the First Ithalo-Ethiopian war.

I'm sure there is a lot of factors that influenced Ethiopian history, but for me, the biggest deal was the Christianity.

So the question is what you guys think? I'm missing something to be more important? Is a very simplistic analysis?

Thanks :)

Im really interested in the early Soviet history under Stalin and Lenin but I can't seem to find enough books about them, is there any suggestions about for history (not fiction) books about general history of the Soviet Union between the two wars?