People love a secret, as long as they are in on it. One might even argue that historians are more attracted to secrecy than the average scholar, or average individual, in that the tools we have for unearthing documentation from the past regularly trawl up long-dormant secrets. At one time, someone may have died to preserve this secret; for me, it is lying accessible in an archive. The challenge is not reading the secret – it is crafting an argument and a narrative that would make others care for this once tightly-held confidence. This fascination of access to privileged information, to being (whether licitly or not) in the know, and the rich texture that hidden material provides, partly explains the recurrent historiographical attention to secrecy. Historians get to have both secrecy and transparency at once, at least in many cases where the precious documents survive and are not still locked behind the classificatory walls of national-security states or profit-seeking megacorporations.

人们喜欢秘密，只要他们参与其中。甚至有人可能会争辩说，历史学家更与一般学者或普通个人相比，他们更喜欢保密，因为我们拥有的用于挖掘过去文献的工具会定期搜索长期处于休眠状态的秘密。曾经，有人可能为保守这个秘密而死；对我来说，它可以在档案中访问。挑战不是阅读秘密——而是精心设计一个论点和一个叙述，让其他人关心这个曾经紧紧握住的信心。这种对获取特权信息的迷恋，对知情（无论是否合法）的迷恋，以及隐藏材料提供的丰富质感，部分解释了史学对保密性的反复关注。历史学家可以同时拥有保密性和透明度，