Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.

Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading from schools of thought in the United Kingdom and France which posited that the Great Man view of history was inaccurate because it did not adequately explain how societies changed. Instead, social historians wanted to show that change arose from within society, complicating the popular belief that powerful leaders were the source of dynamism. While social history came from the Marxist view of history (historical materialism), the cultural turn and linguistic turn saw the number of sub-fields expand as well as the emergence of other approaches to social history, including a social liberal approach and a more ambiguous critical theory approach.

In its "golden age" it was a major field in the 1960s and 1970s among young historians, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%).

There is an important distinction between old social history and new social history that exists in what are now sub-fields of social history that predate the 1960s.^{[clarification needed]} E. P. Thompson identified labour history as the central concern of new social historians because of its " Whiggish narratives", such as the term "labour movement" which, he says, erroneously suggests the constant progression toward the perfect future.^{[better source needed]} The older social history included numerous topics that were not part of mainstream historiography, which was then political, military, diplomatic, constitutional history, the history of great men and intellectual history. It was a hodgepodge without a central theme, and it often included political movements, such as populism, that were "social" in the sense of being outside the elite system.^{[clarification needed]}

The popular view is that new social history emerged in the 1960s with the publication of Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Writing in 1966 in The Times Literary Supplement, Thompson described his approach as "history from below" and explained that it had come from earlier developments within the French Annales School.

According to C. J. Coventry, new social history arose in the 1930s at the University of Cambridge with the Communist Party Historians Group. Citing the reflections of Eric Hobsbawm, a contemporary of Thompson's and a fellow member of the Historians' Group, Coventry shows that the "new" social history popularly associated with Thompson's "history from below" was in fact a conscious revival of historical materialism by young British Marxist intellectuals under the tutelage of the Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb. If so, the foundational text of social history is Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which is marked by its society-wide approach and consideration of everyday people. It was not until the 1960s, however, that social history gained popularity and scholarship flourished. This was when, according to Thompson, "social history truly came into being, with historians reflecting on their aristocratic and middle-class preoccupations, their veneration of elites (especially Great Men), their Protestant moralising and misanthropic tendencies".

There are many definitions of social history, most of them isolated to national historiographies. The most consequential definition of social history is the one Thompson provided. Thompson saw his "history from below" approach as an attempt to reveal the "social nexus" through which broadscale change occurs. This is reflective of his historical materialism. However, Thompson's 1963 book was disproportionately concerned with the lived experience of forgotten or everyday people. The disparity between a society-wide approach (historical materialism) and the narrower preoccupation with giving voice to the voicesless (justice-seeking) is the basis of present-day confusion about the definition of social history. The confusion arose from Thompson's own inner political turmoil. Staughton Lynd sees Thompson's career as a gradual departure from Marxism until, in his last interview, he declined to describe himself as a Marxist. Where Thompson had said he did not believe in "theory with a capital T" and Marxism, Lynd shows that Thompson's departure was actually much more gradual, beginning with the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The highly influential, but confused, definition used by Thompson was not resolved in part because of the cultural turn and the decline of Marxism on the left in the 1970s and 1980s.

The popular phrase "history from below" used in social history first arose in French scholarship before spreading to British scholarship and then elsewhere. Georges Lefebvre first used the phrase "histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut" (history seen from below and not from above) in 1932 when praising Albert Mathiez for seeking to tell the "histoire des masses et non de vedettes" (history of the masses and not of starlets). The phrase "people's history" was first used in the title of British historian A. L. Morton's 1938 book, A People's History of England. Yet it was E. P. Thompson's essay History from Below in The Times Literary Supplement (1966) which brought the phrase to the forefront of historiography from the 1970s. Notably, "History From Below" appeared as the title of the Thompson article, put there by an anonymous editor.