Creatively escaping insularity and encouraging internationalism: British radicalism, history from below, and public relations historiography

Abstract

In this article, we examine what PR history can learn from a small but internationally influential group of radical historians in Britain. In particular, we examine how they managed to be powerfully democratic through an imaginative sensitivity to the voices of people often excluded from history; through grounding research in specific, often small, localities, and communities; and paradoxically, managing to avoid enough of the insularity associated with the notorious “little Britain” mindset to attract interest and interactions from historians across the world. Our article highlights the relevance to PR history of the following four aspects: 1) their awareness of the need to interact locally and beyond national boundaries; 2) their concern for inclusion (especially for subjects excluded or marginalized in earlier historical accounts); 3) their strategies for escaping insularity and increasing interdisciplinarity; and 4) their illustrations of imagination as a vital component in historical writing. For contemporary PR history writing we argue: that the first aspect, the fusion of the local with the post-national, has become a necessity as globalization keeps expanding; that the second, strategic inclusiveness, has urgency for a field reflecting on the social shortcomings of its own organization-centered past; that the third, interdisciplinary, has intensified in utility as fields adapt to the massive growth in different kinds of knowledge (from big data to neuroscience); and that the fourth, passionate and engaged imagination, is needed for revisionist accounts of the past to help reclaim more prosocial futures.