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You have great GPA and languages! Excellent! Now you need to get your honors thesis up and running with at least 25 pages polished by next December for writing sample.
I don't think you've *done* your research well. If anything, I was surprised by your list of schools. I can barely have a bunch of schools in one state myself given my interests. PHD programs are much more interested in whether your interests fit with theirs. If there's nobody there doing Modern Germany or religion history, they will clearly reject you. You need to find scholars whom you admire and want to work with, then find out where they teach. See if there are other faculty members in the department who also have similar interests. After a quick look at some of the schools, Harvard and BU aren't really great matches. Boston College, Michigan, and Chicago might work if you can write a strong statement of purpose. UW Madison is by no means a safety school- it is a top 10 history program and almost everyone applies there.
If you want to be in the academia, you're going have to be willing to move wherever the offers are (just like real world anyway) even if you don't LOVE the town or the state. I am at Michigan now and I do enjoy Ann Arbor but schoolwork keeps me busy enough so I don't think Ann Arbor will get too *old*. I'm not crazy about Michigan but I am enjoying the experience because I get to meet and work with great professors here.
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