Practicing Politics in the Revolutionary Atlantic World: Secrecy, Publicity, and the Making of Modern Democracy

This project explores how decisions and debates about the place of secrecy in politics during the Age of Revolution shaped both the conceptual evolution and practical implementation of representative democracy. In it, Carter traces how revolutionaries in the United States and France navigated the tension between and Enlightenment imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit the extent of transparency. At MHS, she has focused on how political figures reported on their political activity to their correspondents and whether they wrote about the need for secrecy in government.