Focused on colonial and postcolonial Algerians’ social practices and experiences in Algeria and France, this special issue calls for a renewal of Algerian history. Outlining past historical work and new research directions, the introduction argues that to understand colonial Algeria better, historians need to push beyond a political history that assumes a clear contrast between settlers and colonized. While recognizing the colonial divide between settlers and colonized people, we ought to attend to other social hierarchies. These include men and women’s concrete experiences, for instance at work, at home, and in migration, intersections of race, gender, and class, contrasts between rural and urban areas, or the multiple role of religious identities and legal statuses. Reconstructing those social realities will require new archives, of labor and localities, for example, and new methods, including quantitative and oral history.