Why Paine
He wrote the books two governments wanted burned. He was loved on three continents, jailed on one, and dug up after death by a man who lost his bones. A century after he died, no Founder was less honored in the country he helped invent. He’s worth reading again.
His subjects were independence, the rights of the citizen, and what reason looks like when it stops asking permission. He thought clearly and wrote clearly. I keep going back to him.
About the title
Theodore Roosevelt called Paine “a filthy little atheist” in his 1888 biography of Gouverneur Morris -- eighty years after Paine’s death and on no evidence beyond his own irritation. The phrase was wrong on three counts: Paine was not filthy, was not little, and was not an atheist. He was a deist who detested all organized religion and said so out loud. The title of this site reclaims the slur in the same spirit Paine’s contemporaries reclaimed the word democrat -- what your enemies call you is sometimes the truest thing they will ever say about you.
What you’ll find here
- Biography -- a long account of his life, from a Norfolk corset-maker’s shop to the New Rochelle farm where six people attended his funeral.
- Timeline -- every event I’ve been able to date, plotted on a map and a list.
- Works -- the four-volume Conway Edition, transcribed and verified against the printed source.
- Connections -- the people who knew him, debated him, or owed him something.
- Essays -- my own commentary on his ideas, kept short, kept honest.
The Conway Edition
Moncure Daniel Conway -- Virginia-born Unitarian, abolitionist, and Paine’s first scholarly biographer -- published The Writings of Thomas Paine in four volumes through G. P. Putnam’s Sons between 1894 and 1896. It is the standard public-domain scholarly edition, the natural complement to Conway’s 1892 two-volume Life of Thomas Paine, and the canon this site reproduces. I have transcribed the full text against the printed page and verified it against the Internet Archive scans.
On the design
EB Garamond for the body, Inter for the chrome, near-neutral paper, square corners, monochrome ink. A slider in the masthead changes typeface, size, spacing, and theme; it also switches on a ruler, paragraph numbers, and auto-scroll if you want them.
Who built this
I’m Jon Ajinga, a web designer in Colorado. I read Paine in 2024 and was surprised that almost nobody was still teaching him properly. This site is my answer.
It’s built and maintained by my studio, Pikes Peak Web Designs. Every change is in the git history.
If you’d like to help
If you find an error, want to write an essay, or know of a piece I haven’t added, write to me.
“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.”