HISTORY, HISTORIANS AND THE WRITING OF PRINT AND NEWSPAPER HISTORY IN THE UK c.1945–1962

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of work in print and newspaper history written before the 1960s. That decade is seen as marking a break in the way the topic was approached with work prior to the 1960s being criticised for narrowness and theoretical weaknesses. The article points to the sophistication of research and writing prior to 1960, in popular and more scholarly focused work. It argues that the historiography of this topic should be understood in terms of longer processes of development and institutional constraints which correlate with similar developments in other areas of historical research.

Keywords:

• historiography
• newspaper history
• press history
• print history
• popular history
• bibliography
• literary history
• History Today

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments made by Michael Harris and the referees on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. The main focus of this article is on developments in historical writing about print and newspaper history in the UK but it also draws on discussions in the USA when they deal with similar issues. It makes no claims to being a comprehensive analysis of all the work written in the 1950s; it attempts to illuminate the issues by looking at work that appeared in academic journals, popular survey histories, and the monthly History Today, founded in 1951 which set out to make academic history accessible to the public. It draws on work by bibliographers and literary scholars on the topic, but is not intended to address the development of those fields in any detail.

2. For parallel remarks about the late development of the history of the media in Germany (see Beringer and Ross).

3. This section focuses on the UK. For developments in the USA, see Novick.

4. The emphasis on making history widely accessible informed the establishment of the monthly magazine, History Today in 1951. The first issue asserted: ‘History Today is devoted to the study of history—of history in the wider meaning … the main intention of the magazine is to interest the general reader’ (‘Foreword’).

5. Between 1900 and 1950, most history courses were ‘based on the study of continuous English history with emphasis upon the development of the constitution’ (Parker 209).

6. In addition, the intellectually conservative milieu of the profession influenced attitudes to the study of the media (See Butterfield and O'Malley).

7. See below for more detailed discussion of Aspinall's work.

8. The book was published in 1950. His accounts of the rise of cheap popular journalism and of the levels of education of working people were superseded in the decade by the work of Webb and Altick, discussed below.

9. See other work with roots in the 1950s but published early in the first half of the 1960s by Cranfield and Wiles.

10. It also had a weakly developed sense of what was meant by public opinion and the link between that and print, as well as being arguably too focused on the political dimensions of the press and on the nineteenth century to the relative neglect of other topics and periods. I owe these observations to Michael Harris.