[The classes you take and the qualifying exams you have to pass as a PhD candidate in the discipline of History in order to move onto the dissertation phase all have to do with historiography–what historians have had to say about everything. Besides having to read an ungodly amount each class (which grad students in order to survive learn to read quickly if not deeply, good enough to BS your way through a class discussion), we write a lot of book reviews on history books we have been assigned. Occasionally we write historiographical surveys, i.e., summarizing in some coherent fashion what historians have said over the years on some particular topic. The following essays were a couple that I wrote as a grad student at the University of Florida in the early 1990s.]