urbanhistorynerd

I would recommend the relevant essays in Peter Lowenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach 2nd Edition.
IRT the hardships of graduate school, I don't know that they're necessarily worse/better than those in the private sector. My friends who are veterans of the armed services have shared first and second hand experiences that make the most dispiriting day in the Ivory Tower look like an all expenses paid vacation to Disneyland. As long as interpersonal relationships are a component of human activity, there are going to be plenty of opportunities for disappointment, humiliation, and other wonderful feelings.

I started off with applying to 12 programs, and now I've shortened it to 5. 5 really good applications is a lot better than 12 subpar or moderate ones.

From my end, I'm not certain what you'd gain from a MA, but maybe I'm not seeing something.
No, don't worry about phone calls. Email is fine. To all lurkers: don't do what I did and apply blindly. It was one of the stupidest things I did in the whole process.
I would caution you against applying to too many programs: I applied to 9 programs, which was about 4-5 too many.

I think that you should strive for a healthy balance of unbridled optimism and endless optimism.
Visualize yourself developing as a historian this coming year, kicking ass and taking names during the application season, and earning admission to your preferred doctoral programs.
Invest more time into your relationship with history so that your engagement with the past is more than passion. Keep working on your critical thinking skills, your abilities as a researcher, and your writing.
Put aside for now your doubts, fears, and concerns. (There'll be plenty of time for such feelings when you're preparing for your qualifying exams.)

I would be very surprised if this municipality would actually hire a historian who did not also have years of planning/policy/program management experience.

My 2cents to my friends is: No one going into a history Ph.D. program expects to be wealthy afterwards.
 
Financial stability is defined differently if you have kids, a mortgage, or other obligations. But if you are single or even in relationship without children or outstanding debts (such as student loans, etc), you'll have a better time managing the process, both during and after your Ph.D. program.
Like @Sigaba has said before, if you want to be a professor, get a Ph.D., if you want to do anything else, reconsider it. However, this doesn't mean down the road you will be highly overeducated and unemployed. The amount of careers and positions available in higher ed administration, nonprofit, cultural institutions, government, etc, are all fitting and held by history Ph.D.
I work in public history, and nearly everyone I've worked with has a MA or PhD in history. And depending on your field (mine is American urban history) you can apply it to different careers. For example, the city I live in was hiring a director of affordable housing and one of the preferred qualifications was an advance degree in urban studies, anthropology, or history.
The Reddit post makes it seem like if you pursue a history Ph.D. you will become homeless and destitute. Not the case at all. I doubt too many people (evidenced by employment records) are in paucity because they pursued a history Ph.D. What the post should say is that you will not be guaranteed, and it is unlikely, that you will become a tenured professor (lecturers, instructors, VAPs, etc, are also options).
A person with a history Ph.D. is a part of an incredibly educated, skilled, and connected member of the upper strata of American educational attainment ladder, and would be able to work in a multitude of fields, not just teaching.

Would anyone be interested in another SOP swap?

Thank you all for the very considerate, informative, and extremely useful comments!
I will definitely be going through periodicals, and that information on how to read as a graduate student is invaluable!
Should I just start with the latest issues? Or should I make it a point to go through earlier to later?
 

For hard copies, I have this huge binder for my thesis notes. I divided it using tab dividers: secondary sources, newspapers, newsletters, pictures, oral histories, etc. Then I organize them chronologically. I do have a sheet in the front pocket of my binder to tell me what I have and where. 
For digital copies, I have a folder, and then have a similar system. Different folders for each type, then organize chronologically. I also have an Excel sheet as a directory. 

I recommend that during your trip, you save the images to folders by location and/or date and/or archive.
In each folder, have a readme.txt file in which you put basic information about the images in the folder. This information should include guidance on how to cite the materials in your writing.
Later, use a program like Adobe Acrobat to combine the individual photos into PDF files. So if a letter you photographed had two pages and you took two images, you'd have a two-page PDF.
Use the OCR function to turn the PDFs into searchable documents and use file =-> properties ==> description to add meta data to each file.
Download and install a desktop search application like Copernic Desktop Search to index your files.
IF the OCR function does its job and/or you're diligent in adding metadata, the PDFs can be stored in folders with fewer and fewer subfolders.
The upfront costs of this recommendation will be the price of Acrobat (which may be discounted as you're a student), the price of the desktop search application (unless you're satisfied with a free application), the time to run the OCR, and the time to tag the files.
For me, the benefit is this: on my laptop I have 58.5 k indexed items. It takes me less than 5 seconds to find the 74 files I need with the right search words. (The time of this search is without tagging PDFs with metadata.)

It's up to you where to start.
What works for me is to  identify a significant inflection point, drift back a year or two, and then start going forward while simultaneously working backwards from the present. Among other things, I'm looking for extended "state of the art" historiographical essays, roundtables, and extended reviews of significant works. I am paying attention to how my fields of interest are being represented overall. I am "reading selectively" which frequently means reading the footnotes carefully and skimming through the rest of an article and taking very deep dives into historiographical essays. I take very few notes, but I do print/photocopy physical copies and use post it notes to flag points I find noteworthy, insightful, controversial (at my most focused, I'm using four colors of postits with each color meaning something).

But ultimately, it's up to you, through trial and error, to find the methods that work the best for you. (And also defining "what works" means.)
A tip. If you're going through journals and you're feeling good about what you're doing and you're making progress and then all of sudden  you  want to take a nap, give some thought to having a quick nap. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768102/

@urbanhistorynerd, I empathize. Getting a strong grasp of the historiography and major debates of one's field is an intimidating process. I'm in the midst of it and always feel like there's something else I should be reading, or some crucial piece of the puzzle I should already have. And yet, of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. However well we do our homework during the application process, we're in for a constant process of challenging and refining that knowledge once the actual graduate work begins. There will always be hundreds of articles, but we needn't start from scratch when it comes to how to synthesize them. 
I've found the following threads from the History section to be extremely helpful. They're full of the wisdom of established grad students, including @Sigaba answering some of the questions you posed above: 
Reading tips for graduate students in history programs On Reading Effectively In Graduate School How do you organize? (For when you need a system to organize all the notes you're taking) I agree with the suggestion to start with AHR, not only because of the quality of the scholarship but because they're publishing to the widest audience of historians. Thus, the author can't assume the reader is going to be intimately familiar with the major debates in the field of African public health/gender in the British Caribbean/medieval Iberian convivencia/etc. etc. AHR is a great place to practice close reading for "state of the field" summaries, and the bibliographical goldmines that accompany them.

@urbanhistorynerd, one of the many challenges you're facing is that urban history is complex, intricate, detailed, and nuanced yet its best practitioners make it seem so easy that it's easy to conclude "I can do that, too."
Overall, the feedback you're receiving is saying to you that you might be better served preparing a SOP that indicates you know the basics of making thread and maybe a stitch or two before you endeavor to make the sweater.
What big picture historical debate do you wish to address? Can you succinctly summarize those debates? Can you succinctly define your terms? Can you describe realistic projects centered around the use of primary source materials you'd want to do that will advance those debates? Can you indicate how your interests will fit into the research interests of the departments you wish to join? (I am hinting here that you should not focus on individual scholars by name.) Can you chart/project future projects you wish to do as you progress from newly minted assistant professor to Professor of BTDT at Happyland University? For examples of how to address questions [1] to [3], I recommend that you spend some time in the stacks (not on line) of a periodical library. Start with copies of The Historian, JAH, and AHR, maybe even Reviews in American History. Once you feel that your on solid footing, up the level of intensity and start reading through journals that are in your wheelhouse including the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Social History. After that, if you want to take it up another notch, consider stepping out of your comfort zone to look at journals not directly connected to your interests. For this task, I strongly recommend journals that publish articles on modern German history.
An objective of the above-recommended task is that you'll start to see the elegance with which historians communicate. As a mentor told me while he was standing on my head during office hours, "a historian is a historian is a historian." By that he meant (I believe), that there's a structure to historical writing that allows one to communicate a great deal of information in a very limited space to an engaged audience of varying interests.
A secondary objective of the task is for you to find ways that you can curb your tendency towards editorializing. As someone who likes to throw in a zinger here, there, everywhere, I get the appeal. And, as someone who has been bounced off the walls of professors' offices and now makes a living as a technical(ish) writer, I understand how editorializing gets in the way. Here's the thing. if you're a very good writer and you editorialize, professors may cut you some slack. But eventually, the practice will catch up to you and you'll get "notes" that you won't enjoy hearing/reading. 
A pivot.  @ALCON, it appears that this season is going to see more applicants asking openly for feedback on their SOPs. In the event you give feedback, please keep in mind that in some quarters, giving specific guidance can put an applicant on a slippery slope. At some programs, incorporating feedback either word for word or close enough constitutes plagiarism. Let's not screw aspiring graduate students over unintentionally. 

IT’S DONE! I finally got the GRE over with. I’m not the happiest with my score, but I feel as though it’s good enough to not get my applications automatically thrown out... anyways, time to try to relax and read a bit the rest of the summer!

I agree with @Sigaba's questions. Especially, I think it's important for you to argue why this is a good project for a PhD in history and not in anthropology. Historicizing recent events tend to demand methods from Anthro. I am not saying this is not a good project, but a friend of mine had this question raised over and over again because he too dealt with recent events and their roots in the late 1970s. Don't let them wander.*
Your third sentence looks important but it is very week. It has "became" as a verb (weak verb), it's too long, and it has a long list after a sentence with another list. Think about what you want this sentence to do. 
I think your sentence starting "My project..." should be farther up.
The contiguous sentences "The rise of carceral..." and "Examined in a historical..." have no connection with the previous sentence or the sentence that follows them. 
The second to last sentence has a list. This is an empty name-dropping. Be more assertive: "I situate my work in conversation with new studies on suburbanization, race relations in urban settings, and blah blah, epitomized by X, Y, Z. 
The last sentence shouldn't be your last sentence. It should be higher up. Your last sentence should connect your work with the department you are applying to. 
 
Good luck!
 
*FYI archival research doesn't "automatically" mean this is a history project.

This is a good start but I'm not sure I come away with any sense of what you're really, really interested in, in terms of questions. Don't worry about claiming to have any answers yet, instead show readers that you can formulate a historical question. 

That is also a good option!

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I want to take it again unless absolutely necessary. I emailed my top choices to make sure my score was okay. As long as they confirm that it is, I’m not going to put in the time or the effort! 
From what I’ve seen, history GRE scores don’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things. I know I can get my writing sample + SOPs to an incredible level, and I know I have three very strong LORs. I’m not gonna sweat it too much, I don’t think.

Happy summer halfway point everyone! 
I'm gearing up to take the GRE on Saturday-- my scores on practice tests have been stagnant 166-170V, 154-156Q, and 5-5.5AW. I've also gotten drafts of all of my SOPs done-- I still have to write my personal statements for UC Davis and Michigan. I'm going back to start my senior year one month from tomorrow. 
I hope everyone else's summers are similarly productive!

To those of you who are already attending:
How much weight did you put on early stage positive responses from POIs? I have a few schools so far where faculty have been very encouraging, but I have no frame of reference for how encouraged I should actually feel.

How would folks feel about swapping SOP drafts on July 15th or so? For those of you who are done or close to it, what's your writing process been like?
I know that the SOP needs to be customized to each school. So far I've been approaching it as a 2:1 ratio: first two-thirds of each SOP is more universal and describes my research background and the evolution of my interests; the final third specifically talks about my fit for that program. Is it a mistake to treat that first two thirds as a more "generic" portion that will go into each SOP?

Top three important factors in application: 
Writing sample displays your ability to thinking historically, establish a framework for a research project, analytically examine primary documents, synthesize secondary sources into your argument, and most importantly, show that you are capable of being a historian. Take your best paper, have you and your adviser go over it, and polish it multiple times. Rewrite and get everything that is "sketchy" fixed. It won't be perfect, but it is a representation of the culmination of your research and writing abilities. To me, it is the most important part of the application.
Statement of purpose is essentially the introduction to who you are, what you are interested in, who you want to work with, and why you are picking that school. I really have to stress the importance of the SOP because for grad students, it is essentially your cover letter to a job. You want to put a lot of work into it, and get multiple people's advice; ideally your adviser, a current phd student at your university (or on here!), and someone that you think is a very proficient writer (a friend or another professor). Don't create the problem of too many chefs in the kitchen, i.e. too many people looking at your SOP and you going crazy. Think deeply about this, organize it very well, edit like crazy, and be genuine. Your passion, commitment, and ability will shine through if you write a good one.
Letters of recommendation aren't as important as the latter two, but they go a long way in arguing for you. The entire process is essentially a big argument as to why you should be accepted, and hopefully funded, into a program. You are an investment that the university is giving into. The poorly paid positions, stress, and bad treatment may not sound like it, but a stipend and tuition remission for 5-7 year degree is truly the best benefit of doing a PhD. The department wants people who will live up to the amount of time and money invested in them, and your letters of recommendation show the personal nature of your application. It will describe how well a professor enjoyed working with you, how your research has developed, what you are like in courses, etc. Needless to say, talk to the people that know you the best, ideally a main adviser who knows your work, and two others who are familiar with you. This doesn't have to be people you've known for a long time- even just for a semester- it is all about the relationship you have with the person, and someone you admire.
There is a lot more that go into it, but these three are things that should be nearly perfected. Also, I am in the process f applying this year, so if you wanna chat about anything, let me know!

I don't know what you mean by "showcase". Is there anything more to it than listing your accomplishments? There isn't really much for you to discuss (you can discuss the project, findings, its broader contribution to your field, etc. That's more important than having had a conference presentation, btw. Communicating the science and your understanding of it is what schools will be looking for.). It'd be more effective to have LOR writers contextualize these grants and their noteworthiness ("this is our more prestigious award", "only one person in Field has won this grant in the past 150 years", "other students in our department who've won this award are XYZ, and they have gone on to do awesome things ABC", etc). You can't really do that yourself. This is precisely why your application is evaluated holistically -- some things are best communicated by the authority figures that support you, not by you directly.