foofish: i buy ur arguments on writing, haha as you can probably tell my writing abilities are less than par. however, research? analytic? and what kind of jobs are you referring to. i was more thinking along the lines of say: history majors becoming history teacher or philosophy majors becoming ethicist and etc.
Well, if you take an event....say the end of the Cold War....it's not like one person woke up and decided that hey, he'd end the Cold War today, and then get a $5 million book deal to write the definitive account. The causes and consequences of an event are set into motion long before anyone even recognizes it as happening. Plus, there are always different sides and perspectives, and always a huge number of people involved, and each of their actions, beliefs, and ideas impact everyone else...and there's always events and decisions being made in the private sector that impact the public sector without its knowledge....and piecing it all together is part of what "doing" history is....because there is never someone who has their finger on every single factor and component of an event at the time it is going on and who can explain their complex interrelationships.
I've done both history and science to a fairly advanced level, and at least personally I think physics/bio is much easier because there's a concrete answer and cause and action...you're applying known rules, or determining rules, which dictate behavior....in history you're looking at cause and action, but there are very few governing "rules" to guide your understanding.
As a history major I could have easily gone into law, publishing, politics, consulting, business/finance, etc....and those are only the fields that I was ever vaguely interested in, and which would not really have required extra training. History is a big, big feeder into Law and politics (it's sort of the biology of med school applicants).
