While not earning wide-spread recognition as an identifiable craft until the last century, public relations efforts and those practicing it can be found throughout recorded history. Among other dubious examples of early promotional communication, Eric the Red in 1000 A.D. dubbed the island of ice and rock he discovered in the north Atlantic as Greenland in hopes of attracting settlers to a new locale that was anything but as it was labeled. More positive examples, depending on your nationality, of early public relations were evident during the American Revolution where staged events such as the Boston Tea Party and its subsequent publicity spurred colonists to take up arms against Great Britain. Eventually, public relations advanced from promotions of Wild West shows and P.T. Barnum's touring spectacle to communication and issues management consulting that was brought about as the result of American's becoming doubtful of corporations following the actions of early muckrakers.

Currently, after being influenced by wartime communication efforts and counselors who finally labeled the field, public relations has evolved into a field of professionals academically trained in the craft. No doubt that public relations in the 21st century is performed on a much different stage with different objectives from those representative of PR's early roots in rhetoric and the Roman forum. The increasing number of stakeholders successful organizations must recognize and relate to as well as the ever-changing state of communication technology that seems to be progressing at warp speed over the last 20 years among numerous other changes have painted a much different picture of PR as compared to how it was conceptualized less than a century ago when Edward Bernays was laying the foundation of modern public relations. Despite the current state of progress in the profession, however, it must be recognized that public relations is a field with a rich evolutionary history that is being rewritten even as it develops, and any attempt to outline current and future public relations must necessarily be rooted in the history of public relations.