What does social history mean and how should social history be practiced? After a number of twists and turns (linguistic, cultural, post-modernist, and recently archival) eminent practitioners of the historical craft now hold that social history is dead; others – as Gylfi Magnússon holds – keep “whistling past the graveyard” as if nothing happened. A way out of this impasse, Geoof Eley and Simona Cerutti suggest, is to reconcile the social with the cultural. In this paper, I argue that if historians claim to deal with the social, they should simply attempt to rescue the totality of the past.