Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

This project shows how patriot leaders’ old regime epistolary training shaped their political organizing during the late eighteenth-century age of revolutions. Through case studies in the American and French Revolutions and the Dutch Patriot movement, it shows how differences in epistolary habits led patriots to create public networks that differed in their structure, organization, and ideological content. These, in turn, helped create different routes towards kingless government in each revolution. As the first comparative study of the revolutions in several decades to be based on archival research in multiple national contexts, it offers a new account of the process of political radicalization in the late eighteenth century.