This critical introduction discusses the major interventions of this special issue commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. The aim of the five essays collected in this issue is to neither dismiss nor glorify Foucault. Reengaging with Foucault’s work on sexuality, they instead articulate a range of penetrating insights that should be of interest to any scholar concerned with the ethics of historical practice. Above all, they show that historical truthfulness is always relative, historical methodology carries political power, and historical scholarship lives unpredictable afterlives. This provides cultural historians a tremendous degree of flexibility in thinking with Foucault’s history of sexuality today.