Well, after reviewing a couple things I'm looking into pursuing a PhD in history or anthropology. I'll likely go with history as I enjoy the thought of being able to pick my own area of study and expertise. Not to mention, advanced math and physics skills don't hold much weight in history! I think I may enrol in a German language course as well as any ancient language (Latin, Old Norse, Old English, etc.) courses I can find. Other than that, I'll just keep doing what I usually do...read books and do my own research. At least I'll be able to keep my flowin' mane if I don't join the military!
I am a historian and in academia, and this is a bittersweet post for me to read. On the one hand, it's great to see bright young people recognize the value of history. On the other hand, I feel obligated to give you a realistic sense of what you're up against.
In North America, college history positions get hired on an annual cycle. Most jobs get posted at the end of the summer or early fall, and you submit your applications between September and November. The hiring committees sift through all the applications and pick a dozen or two to interview, usually at the AHA Annual Meeting right after New Years; based on that, typically 3 or 4 get invited to a campus visit (typically in February or so) and then, of course, just one gets hired in March or April, who will take the position for the following Fall semester. There is also a second wave of Spring postings, mostly lower-ranking schools and temporary positions. For one slot, a committee typically gets at least a hundred applications. Of course, it's more or less the same hundred people applying for all the jobs available in a given specialization, but in any given specialization there are typically maybe 25-35 positions opened each year (in all of North America). Bottom line; in history, you can spend six or seven years after college getting your PhD and find yourself in a job market with a 25% chance of finding full-time employment.
What makes things worse are shifts in college administration. In the 2007 recession, budgets got hit hard. A lot of schools had hiring freezes and did not hold searches to replace any faculty who retired for some years after that. To cover coursework, they hired adjuncts instead. If you're not familiar with the phenomenon, an adjunct is part-time faculty that gets hired a la carte, typically for $2500-3000 per course. The idea was originally that it's a way for a grad student or an outside specialist to come in and teach a class. The recession is theoretically over, but there are so many un- or underemployed PhDs out there that many schools have continued hiring adjuncts rather than creating proper tenure-track professorships. Union rules say that anyone who teaches three or more courses per semester is full-time and gets benefits, so most schools cap an adjunct's course load at two courses. That limits an adjunct's income to a whopping $12,000 a year with no benefits. Of course, you can teach classes at multiple schools and try to increase that, which means lots of commuting and lots of hustling every term to find work for the following term. You wind up not getting much research done, which makes you a weaker applicant in next year's tenure-track hiring cycle, which leaves you no option but to keep adjuncting permanently. It's a grim circle.
I guess the point of all this is that history (and I assume anthropology is similar) is not a field to go to because you find it kinda fun and interesting. Examine yourself very seriously on this point. It's not a competitive job market, it's a massacre. ONLY go into it if you are so passionate about it that it would kill you to do anything else.
The good news, if you decide to proceed, is that you're thinking of it early and can start preparing yourself from the beginning of your undergrad studies. I didn't figure out it was what I wanted to do till late; my friends who have been more successful than I in History and Classics were already dedicated to it from undergrad. If you want to do anything other than American history, languages are key, and it looks like you know that, which is good. German and Latin are the two you want to focus on. Stuff like Old Norse or Old English you can add later; both are basically Germanic languages, so if you know German well you'll pick them up without too much difficulty, and both have much less written in them than in Latin, and both were written in contexts where Latin was the dominant language of learning and writing. So even if you decide to go study Vikings or Anglo-Saxons, you'll still be expected to be able to work in Latin. Besides English, most of the relevant scholarship is written in German or French. Other modern languages are only really necessary to study the history of their respective countries (e.g. you'd need Spanish to study medieval Spain, but if you're studying Vikings there isn't much important scholarship published in Spanish).
One piece of advice: the trend lately has been to hire for "world history." It's kind of ridiculous - nobody can specialize in the history of the entire world - but what's really going on is that school administrations are trying to kill two birds with one stone. They want someone who can teach medieval Europe AND the Muslim Middle East or T'ang China or something. So if you can pick up a non-western language like Arabic or Chinese, or some relevant coursework, so much the better.
Finally: network, and mentors. Besides having languages and relevant coursework, a lot of what will determine your success or failure will be who knows you and who's pulling for you. It's usually the disciple who picks the master, not vice versa; whatever field you go into (whether it's history or not), go to your professors outside of class, get to know them, ask about their research, ask for their advice on your career, all that stuff. Be the student that everybody in the department knows. If there are outside speakers coming to campus, or conferences with undergrad sessions, go to them and participate actively. When it comes time to apply for doctoral programs (and later on, jobs), there's a difference between a perfunctory letter saying "HeavyAxe was a very good student" and one that says "Let me tell you about all the amazing things HeavyAxe has done and why he's the most promising historian we've taught..."
That was long-winded, but I hope it's helpful.
