The Social History Postgraduate Program, created in 1971, is one of the largest, oldest and most renowned in Brazil. It accounts for the degrees of personnel who work today in virtually all Brazilian establishments. The program keeps showing its predominant association with “Social History”, because such association is what links the different internal particulars of the Program, provides it with identity and it is through it that the concerns to understand historical phenomena are expressed. Thus, we regard that even when we deal on a priority basis with political, institutional or cultural aspects of the history process, the common ground of our concerns is always social history–whether of a more sociological nature; or the renewed social history, under the patterns of the mid-twentieth century English historiography. Under this standpoint, our different lines of research are established, within which researchers can then get involved with their specificities and specialties. This is the distinctive profile of the Program, which manages to combine a healthful heterogeneity with common bases.