The publication of Alessandro Stanziani’s Tensions of Social History provides a useful opportunity to reconsider the global field of ‘social history’, a topic that continues to be a fertile area of research. As the author suggests, adopting a ‘social history’ perspective on historiographical practices by focusing on the dialogical construction (in terms of social actors and geographical locations) of crucial junctions in historical research (archives, data, categories and models) could reinvigorate the debate in Italy as well.