The last two years have seen some significant anniversaries being celebrated – one hundred years of the Bolshevik Revolution, fifty years since May 1968, two hundred years since the birth of Karl Marx and, most recently, the birth centenary of Rosa Luxemburg. As a student activist more or less masquerading as an amateur theatre historian, I have never felt more in need of the tools of my so-called trade than during these interesting times when I found myself assiduously attending conferences, memorials, re-enactments and commemorative performances earmarking moments of radical histories. David Wiles's article, charting the contours – often clear and sometimes obscure – of the field of theatre history as it stands at the moment brings into relief some of the questions that have been running in the background of the heady extended solidarity party that has been my engagement with the field in recent times, resonating with his conclusion of history-writing as ‘practice, not product’. I will attempt to glean from Wiles's reflections some points that I feel may be important for scholars for whom history writing is most certainly a ‘social practice’, if not also a deeply political act.