The publication of “Tensions of Social History” by Alessandro Stanziani provides an opportunity to rethink social history, a field and set of orientations still lively around the world. As the author suggests, revisiting a social history of historiographical practices could reopen a debate in Italy, too, focusing on the dialogic construction (both in terms of social figures and geographical locations) of the crucial junctions of the historian’s craft (archives, data, categories and models).