Here’s a first tip for humanist TeXheads.
The Chicago Manual of Style calls for footnote numbers that are not superscript and followed by a period. It’s really not that obvious how to do this in LaTeX, and it was many years before I learned how. Put this in your preamble:
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@makefntext[1]{%
\parindent 1em%
\@thefnmark.~#1}
\makeatother
See Mittlebach and Goosens’s LaTeX Companion, 112–14. Unlike the standard \@makefntext, this version does not put the footnote number in a \makebox hanging off the left margin of the footnote body. Many books also use different length rules between body and footnotes when a footnote continues from a previous page. For that, use the preamble command \usepackage[splitrule]{footmisc}. This invocation must precede the command that changes \@makefntext, or footmisc will clobber your nice formatting.
The code for altering endnotes (if you use the endnote package) is slightly different:
\renewcommand\enoteformat{\parindent 1em\theenmark.~}
On the other hand, if you use the recently developed biblatex-chicago package, your footnotes will be correctly formatted—with more or less this very command. The package also has a strict option which will suppress the rule except for footnotes continued from a previous page (the Manual’s preferred style).