psstein

It is probably in your best interest to be around 1000 words, though slightly over is okay. It's really designed to prevent them from having to read 10 page SoPs with multiple footnotes, long historiographical discourses, etc.

You should translate - this is the standard for contemporary academic writing and its bizarre that your department told you not to. If you think it will help showcase your language abilities, you can include the original language in footnotes. But the ability to produce clear translations of the sources you work with is an important skill, and one that should be apparent in your sample.

It's probably fine either way; what matters is that you demonstrate your ability to work with these sources. I included both translations & the original language(s) in mine as a means of saying "yoohoo, look what I can do" but haven't the foggiest idea whether it actually mattered.

Certainly, what I mean is that the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, probably one of the most dominant ones since the 60s, is in full retreat. Many scholars (wrongly IMO, but still) view Cambridge-style Intellectual History as predominantly Eurocentric. What do I think is more active? That's not an easy question to answer. I'd say that there's a stronger lean towards transnational approaches to intellectual history (see the journal Global Intellectual History), as well as an interest in applying Cambridge methods to non-European contexts. J.G.A. Pocock, who's still alive, has written recently about translating the Cambridge School to other contexts.

Certainly, what I mean is that the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, probably one of the most dominant ones since the 60s, is in full retreat. Many scholars (wrongly IMO, but still) view Cambridge-style Intellectual History as predominantly Eurocentric. What do I think is more active? That's not an easy question to answer. I'd say that there's a stronger lean towards transnational approaches to intellectual history (see the journal Global Intellectual History), as well as an interest in applying Cambridge methods to non-European contexts. J.G.A. Pocock, who's still alive, has written recently about translating the Cambridge School to other contexts.

English went through an "eco-criticism" thing a couple years ago. Now I hardly see any advertisements for eco-criticism jobs. "Medical humanities" has also rapidly cooled.
The job market is just extremely quirky. I can't even enumerate how many times I've said to myself, "Oh, I wish I'd done That Thing!" ... only to see that next year's job market has moved on and is no longer into That Thing anymore. 
Just ... don't even bother gaming the market. Certain things will always *help* you, to some extent--if you are a literature person and can work as a WPA or in a writing center ... that might help you land a generalist job that's looking for someone who can run a writing center or train other writing teachers. These days schools look to kill as many birds as possible with one stone.

I think it's also important to state that some elite private high schools now require you to have a Master's degree or higher to teach at their institution.
 
I think the best advice one can take is to study the period that they're most interested in. Don't try to game the market; it most likely wouldn't work. If you study what your most interested in, you're more likely to stay committed and take an interest in wanting to do more research on your dissertation.

It's actually a huge relief to know that other people have had similar experiences. Before working with Kelsky, I had been told that her manner could be "off putting" but that she otherwise did good work. Well, I have thick skin (you have to in order to survive in this job market!), so I felt I could probably handle whatever was coming my way. What I COULDN'T handle was the sloppy work on her end. That part I felt was borderline unethical, considering what she charges. Like, it's wrong to take that kind of money and then say "go read my blog" or "cut 20 words." And indeed, it's a shame that there is no one else with an alternative editing service to challenge the monopoly she has on this business. Because yes, I do think that there's a need for it: it's useful to have someone outside of this profession--a professional editor, for instance--look over your writing to really make sure the sentences are clicking and everything's moving from one point to the next. Even people with great advisors can stand to have someone else pick apart their writing. 
The other major caveat that I'd mention to the OP is that apparently SCs now recognize a "Kelsky letter" from a mile away. (I just read this somewhere, can't remember where.) Her template is so particular--and she insists that everyone follow it because in her world if you don't you'll get tossed from the pile--that SCs are now complaining that the stuff they're receiving is formulaic and cookie cutter. I mean, she has just the most ridiculous rules for what goes in each paragraph, what order to follow, and how many words should be in each paragraph. That stuff is nonsense. While it's smart to streamline your dissertation paragraph as much as you possibly can (more to make it exciting than to satisfying some arbitrary rule), you don't want to sacrifice some of your more important claims. And some of her rules about mentioning second book projects can be disregarded entirely if you're applying for a teaching-focused position.
All I basically learned from Kelsky was that I am glad I was not a job seeker when she was doing the hiring at her university. Because apparently doing one wrong thing in front of her would seal your fate as not only a losing job candidate but also an inept human being. You wore a skirt to the interview and ate spaghetti when you were out to dinner with the committee--bad you. You mentioned that you "love teaching." Pack your bags now, because you are never getting an academic job. I understand that the university has become as neoliberal as any other aspect of society, but I also don't think it's as nasty and capricious as Karen makes it out to be, with people sneering at candidates because they wore the wrong shoes and brought an ugly briefcase to an MLA interview. 
For the OP: I would advise hiring Kelsky ONLY if you feel so poorly served by your committee and grad program that you're sure your materials aren't articulating your full potential. In that case, her advice might be worth it to some extent. I think that if you're writing a terrible cover letter and a bad teaching statement, she might be able to offer a few nuggets that pull you out of the fire. 
In the end, this is what I did that made my letter better: 
1. I took a hard copy of it to my advisor and stood over him while he picked it apart. Previously, I'd done that sort of thing with him, but only over email. Getting him to look at it in person--in hard copy while I stood there--made a world of difference.
2. I ran the letter by my JPO, another committee member who is young and had been on the market 5 years ago, and a friend of mine who got a job. Their advice was not as sharp as my advisor's, but they provided good feedback. I also did a mock interview with people in my department, and they also gave me feedback. 
3. I got the letter of a guy my department hired two cycles ago--a real rising super star whose cover letter was a thing of beauty. I studied his letter and tried to do what he did. 
4. I studied all the letters my department had on file and "stole" the bits I thought worked well.
5. I wrote and rewrote my letter over the course of several months.
The last thing was what really helped, I think. These letters are freaking hard to write and the only way to do them is to evolve them over several drafts and the course of a month or a year. 
Having said all that, a graceful cover letter is not going to land you a job. It might not even get you an interview. As Bronte85 pointed out upthread, your marketability comes down to your degree, your advisor, you publications, and other factors out of your control. A poorly written letter might get you removed from the pile, but a well-written letter will not work a miracle in this job market. Like, if your school is currently placing people at small branch campuses and teaching colleges, then an artful cover letter will not get you a job at U of Michigan. That's not to say that you shouldn't work to polish your letter as much as possible--you want to think of every letter as a persuasive essay about why you're the best person for this job--but it's not going to make or break your application, and Kelsky is wrong to assert that bad job materials are why people can't get jobs.  

Yes, there is some truth to this. English class enrollments are at an all-time low, so classes have had to get "trendier" to attract non-English major students. So you start to see a lot more classes these days in science fiction, Harry Potter, graphic novels, film adaptation, etc.  Anything to entice students who "hate to read" to sign up for an English class. 
The only students who take things like Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and 18th-century novels are English majors, and we don't have many English majors anymore. Truly, that's what's driving the slump in the job market. People aren't eager to drop $200k on a degree in a major they perceive (wrongly) as qualifying them only to teach high school or work at Starbucks. 

I really, really disagree with this. Just speaking with my own emeriti who got their jobs in the 80s, it wasn't that easy. Two very well-known historians of science (both Harvard PhDs from the 80s) told me how they had a sheaf of rejection letters. The job market you're describing existed in the 1950s-1970s, where higher ed expanded to meet both a growing population and the needs of national defense. It hasn't really existed since the early 80s.
As for "have to be really excellent," I'm sorry, but that's also just not the case. There are many highly capable people with good publishing records/conference presentations/award winning books/etc. who have a lot of trouble finding full-time academic employment. Even speaking to younger faculty can show some real horror stories.
When I was still in Wisconsin, I was at an acceptance weekend event and speaking with a prospective student. She told me "I could go to X or Y Univ., and just outwork everyone into a job." I had to hold my tongue and tell her "it doesn't fucking work like that." It doesn't. Telling a student "if you're a superstar at Univ. of the Western Ozarks, of course you'll get a job!" is nothing short of negligence.

I reiterate the example I gave earlier: Columbia's English Department did not place any of their graduating cohort in 2019 a TT job. (see the Chronicle's article. This is a follow up of the original which is behind a paywall). The TT job market is bad regardless of the program you attend and no one can predict what it is going to be like in six years. Thinking that attending a Top 20 program (based on an arbitrary ranking system) will land you a job is naive and misinformed.

I really, really disagree with this. Just speaking with my own emeriti who got their jobs in the 80s, it wasn't that easy. Two very well-known historians of science (both Harvard PhDs from the 80s) told me how they had a sheaf of rejection letters. The job market you're describing existed in the 1950s-1970s, where higher ed expanded to meet both a growing population and the needs of national defense. It hasn't really existed since the early 80s.
As for "have to be really excellent," I'm sorry, but that's also just not the case. There are many highly capable people with good publishing records/conference presentations/award winning books/etc. who have a lot of trouble finding full-time academic employment. Even speaking to younger faculty can show some real horror stories.
When I was still in Wisconsin, I was at an acceptance weekend event and speaking with a prospective student. She told me "I could go to X or Y Univ., and just outwork everyone into a job." I had to hold my tongue and tell her "it doesn't fucking work like that." It doesn't. Telling a student "if you're a superstar at Univ. of the Western Ozarks, of course you'll get a job!" is nothing short of negligence.

Yes, this.
And also, more generally, it's comforting to tell ourselves narratives about why unsuccessful candidates are obviously so unsuccessful ("he's got a bad personality"; "she must have botched her teaching presentation"). Resist that impulse. In this job market, it's quite possible to do everything "right" and still be shut out not for multiple jobs but for multiple years on the job market. Regardless of what Karen Kelsky may try to tell you (i.e. sell you), there aren't tons of candidates out there who make it to the final round and then get up to give their job talk and do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAanrkLn6bI&t=0m24s  Most of us are pretty practiced at interviewing and job-talking by the time we get to the final stage. I don't know anyone who makes the ridiculous mistakes that get passed around as cautionary tales on social media (and I've also seen people give less-impressive job talks that resulted in a job anyway).
It's possible to do everything "right" and walk away from the table without a job.
 

I went to a "lower-ranked" program (I guess? It was ranked somewhere between #25-#35 in USNWR, with its exact placement shuffling around every few years). I have to say that I would not attend that specific program now, knowing what I know and what I've been through. 
I know people all over the place who didn't go to the world's greatest programs and still managed to find TT jobs. (Like anything, getting hired comes down to luck and nebulous ideas about "fit"--which are quirkier on the job market than in admissions). But yeah, it can be a lot harder to get a job. Or get into a conference. Or find the time to publish (since those who go to lower-ranked schools teach so much). And postdocs are extremely difficult to secure, because many of them are indeed "prestige obsessed."
But the worst thing about going to a low-ranking program is that you're always judged by where you got your PhD. Always. The obsessing over credentials and Ivies that goes on here? It doesn't go away after you start grad school, finish grad school, or get a job. 
There are a lot of people out there who believe quite strongly in Top Ten or Bust. Thing is, they don't believe it just for them. They believe it for the rest of us too. So when you bump into that person at a conference ... or during a fellowship ... or, worst of all, on a search committee, they are going to be holding you to the standard to which they held themselves. They are going to be thinking to themselves, "Why did this person decide to go to Fredericksburg State for their PhD? Didn't they understand that it's Top Ten or Bust? What were they thinking? Or maybe they just couldn't get into to a good school? Then why did they even bother to go? I would have applied a million times over so as not to go to Fredericksburg State."
The most demoralizing thing of all is when the faculty at your own program feel this way about you and your fellow grad students. I actually ran into that a lot at my program. Like most R1 schools, our faculty was recruited almost completely out of Ivies. And there were a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle digs about our prospects. One guy who served as our JPO went to Berkeley--without funding. And he really looked down at us because of the program we were attending. 
I know many people who went to the top programs and who hold varying attitudes about people who attend lower-ranked schools (or some of them are at least good about keeping their real feelings under wraps), but two of them stick out to me. One is a person who applied three times in order to go to a top program, actually "dropping out of life" completely while she was trying to get in and incurring a lot of debt in the process. She turned down solid and well-ranked programs on the way. I thought this was insane. In the time it took her just to get into grad school, I was already through coursework and exams at my lower-ranked program. But she did eventually get into her top choice, and she's by far the most ruthless person I know about all this. She'll definitely be on admissions committees and search committees in the future--IMO to the detriment of more "working class" or non-traditional people in the field. 
The other person looks down on all people who went to a program outside the top 5. She once referred to Princeton as "not a fab English program." I kinda didn't know what to say to that.
But anyway--that's what you'll encounter out there with a degree from a lower-ranked school. The people you bump up against at this stage who don't think there's life outside the top 10? They don't go away, and they don't learn, and they aren't disabused of their notions. They stick around and get the good jobs, and from that vantage point they continue to replicate the same kind of attitudes that make it difficult for low-ranked PhDs in the first place. 
That is what I wish I had known. 

The distinction has some meaning, but it's also a lot easier to find a ranking list than it is to find a comparative list of placement rates for the past 5 years. 
I don't think a single metric is a good evaluation tool for anything, whether it's my program's rank or my GRE scores, but it counts as a warning sign.

You know the full story, but this is a significant portion of why I left the PhD. I couldn't justify spending years (with a questionably supportive department) to obtain a degree, that, in all honesty, doesn't have a huge amount of application outside the academy. The "alt-ac" job push is a topic for another time, but I am not positive towards it. I think it's a ready made excuse to ignore structural problems of PhD training.
I don't consider "rankings" the same as placement. Placement is, IMO, one of the few metrics that actually matters, if you want a TT career afterwards. I would submit that there are departments ranked in the top 20 on US News and World Report that are not in the top 30 in terms of placement. Moreover, if all 6 of your cohort found TT jobs, your placement ranks you much higher than the mid-40s, just IMO, of course.

You know the full story, but this is a significant portion of why I left the PhD. I couldn't justify spending years (with a questionably supportive department) to obtain a degree, that, in all honesty, doesn't have a huge amount of application outside the academy. The "alt-ac" job push is a topic for another time, but I am not positive towards it. I think it's a ready made excuse to ignore structural problems of PhD training.
I don't consider "rankings" the same as placement. Placement is, IMO, one of the few metrics that actually matters, if you want a TT career afterwards. I would submit that there are departments ranked in the top 20 on US News and World Report that are not in the top 30 in terms of placement. Moreover, if all 6 of your cohort found TT jobs, your placement ranks you much higher than the mid-40s, just IMO, of course.

It's pretty easy to call this sort of answer "facile" if you haven't watched friend after brilliant friend struggle to make ends meet after graduating, or if you yourself have never had to live on poverty wages. Those of us who have tend to find any other answer shockingly privileged and naive.
For the record: I attend an Ivy. I love my program and doing what I do. I have an incredibly supportive department in all ways that matter. I would not do it again.

I would still argue that ranking is not the same as placement, and that coming from higher ranked program doesn't mean a higher chance in getting a TT job. (All of my cohort (6 people from different subfields) got TT jobs and we are a program in the 40s). Furthermore, regarding English, there was a recent article in the Chronicle about how Columbia could not place any of their graduating PhDs in TT jobs (I have 3 friends in English that landed TT jobs). Although prestige can mean something, it is not an automatic ticket to anything. 
Unfortunately, there is no formula.... but I do think that looking at rankings alone it's just a very narrow point of view. 

Foucault has greater influence within STS studies, if that distinction is really of any use at this point.

Foucalt has had a pretty large impact on both the humanities and social sciences. Every professor trained after ca. 1980 fits this description.

Do you speak/read French? If not, that's going to be a major obstacle. If you can produce a writing sample demonstrating good working knowledge of French, your background in European history will be a bit less of a concern. I can't remember how many Euro courses I had in college. I had zero history of science courses, and, while that did prove a bit of an impediment to my applications, it wasn't a big issue in the long run.
I think NYU has a good French history program. J.B. Shank (Minnesota) is very good, but he's more a historian of science. If you came here, you'd work with Suzanne Desan, but I'm not sure how much longer she'll be active. She was going to retire shortly, but then took on a new graduate student...

Or look at a 2 year MA, or a Fullbright app. There's nothing particularly notable about taking more undergraduate courses, especially if you can be doing instead of just sitting in class. A couple semesters of, say, Arabic looks good, but a year in Marrakesh (or Seville) looks better, for example - and it would probably actually give you more useful skills. Going in straight from undergraduate is very rare these days, in any case.

At this point, entering into my 8th (and final!) year, my comps feel like another lifetime.  I do agree with both @Sigaba and @AP.  
DO go to the job talks in your department even if no other graduate student does. Even if it's not in your field.  Do it. You're going because you need to see how job candidates draw out big themes in his or her work to connect to the audience and how the audience-- faculty members in DIFFERENT fields-- find ways to connect. I recall one job talk by a 18th century French cultural historian and a 20th century Chinese cultural historian raised his interest and question to her project. "I'm a Chinese historian BUT I LOVE your work on cultural networks of presses in France!  Here's my question...."  Not only this but you will be SO far ahead of the game from your peers. Do ask what the committee member's expectation is.  Every person is going to be different. Either I was awful at phrasing my questions of "what are we really going to talk about?" as @Sigaba warned of, or my committee was reluctant to be specific, either way, I actually failed my oral exam for that reason (among a few other critical areas).  Once I picked up the pieces (with the help of my saint adviser), we were able to outline clear expectations in writing. Only with this list was I able to determine when I was truly ready to re-take my oral exam. Truthfully, try to have at least one committee member who is very down-to-earth (but intense), patient, and "harmless" (like a whale shark among the white sharks).  The person will make a huge, huge difference to your sanity.  I had a senior, top-of-the-field professor who had nothing to lose in her ranking by throwing soft balls in my way while everyone else (including my adviser) wanted to engage deeper, provoking, out-of-the-left field questions. I could not wait for her turn during the orals. It's okay to be traumatized, even if you have (mostly) nice group of professors who mean well. Until that point, you will never have experienced that kind of stress.  (Ask me again the spring when I finish my dissertation and whether that was more stressful...)

McCormick is an old adviser and Conant is on my diss committee, and of course the latter was the former's student. McC is fairly absolutist when it comes to languages (as befits a trained and ardent philologist), but Jonathan just took a student with German and little Latin, so there's possibly a bit of hope for you there? You should also consider learning Arabic.
The list of professors is solid! Others, like Kyle Harper, are not at institutions I can recommend attending in this job market - even PSU is a bit touch and go there. 
Just looking at recent acceptances, I don't see you having a good shot at any of these programs without a good MA or a Fullbright year, for what that's worth.