{
  "version": 1,
  "count": 50,
  "entries": [{
        "term": "abolition",
        "aliases": ["abolitionist","abolitionism"],
        "short": "The movement to end slavery and the slave trade; Paine's *African Slavery in America* (1775) and the preamble he drafted for Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act (1780) are landmark American documents in the cause.",
        "slug": "abolition",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "agrarian",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Pertaining to the land; in eighteenth-century usage often the radical claim that the soil was originally common property of all -- the argument Paine made in *Agrarian Justice* (1797).",
        "slug": "agrarian",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "anglican",
        "aliases": ["church of england","established church"],
        "short": "The Church of England, the state-established Protestant church Paine was christened into despite his Quaker father; the institutional target of much of his religious writing.",
        "slug": "anglican",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "antifederalist",
        "aliases": ["antifederalists","anti-federalist"],
        "short": "Opponents of the 1787 U.S. Constitution who argued it gave too much power to the central government; many later became Jeffersonian Republicans, the faction Paine identified with on his return.",
        "slug": "antifederalist",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "barlow",
        "aliases": ["joel barlow"],
        "short": "Joel Barlow (1754-1812): Connecticut Wit, American consul in Paris, Paine's closest English-speaking friend through the Luxembourg years; he saw *The Age of Reason* Part I through the press.",
        "slug": "barlow",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "bastille",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The Paris fortress-prison stormed on July 14, 1789, the symbolic opening of the French Revolution; Lafayette gave its main key to Paine to send to Washington, where it still hangs at Mount Vernon.",
        "slug": "bastille",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "burke",
        "aliases": ["edmund burke"],
        "short": "Edmund Burke (1729-1797): Anglo-Irish statesman whose *Reflections on the Revolution in France* (1790) provoked Paine's *Rights of Man*; the founding text of modern conservatism, paired ever since with Paine's reply.",
        "slug": "burke",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "calumny",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "An eighteenth-century word for malicious slander; Paine used it often in defending himself against the political and clerical press of the 1790s.",
        "slug": "calumny",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "common sense",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Paine's January 1776 pamphlet, the most widely read American political pamphlet ever published; over 100,000 copies sold in three months in a colonial population of 2.5 million.",
        "slug": "common-sense",
        "proper": true
      },{
        "term": "condorcet",
        "aliases": ["marquis de condorcet"],
        "short": "Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): mathematician, philosophe, Paine's collaborator on the 1793 Girondin draft constitution; died in hiding from the Jacobins.",
        "slug": "condorcet",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "continental army",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The army Congress raised in 1775 to fight the British, commanded by Washington; the *American Crisis* No. I was read aloud to it on December 23, 1776, three days before the crossing into Trenton.",
        "slug": "continental-army",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "convention",
        "aliases": ["national convention","french convention"],
        "short": "The French legislative assembly that succeeded the Legislative Assembly in September 1792 and tried Louis XVI; Paine sat as deputy for the Pas-de-Calais.",
        "slug": "convention",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "conway",
        "aliases": ["moncure conway","moncure d. conway"],
        "short": "Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907): Virginia-born Unitarian, abolitionist, and Paine's first scholarly biographer; editor of *The Writings of Thomas Paine* (4 vols., 1894-96), the source edition for this site.",
        "slug": "conway",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "crisis",
        "aliases": ["the american crisis","the crisis"],
        "short": "Paine's 13-number wartime pamphlet series (December 1776-April 1783), opening with 'These are the times that try men's souls.'",
        "slug": "crisis",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "deism",
        "aliases": ["deist","deistical"],
        "short": "The eighteenth-century rational religion holding that one universal Creator can be inferred from nature alone, without revealed scripture or ordained clergy; Paine's settled position from at least 1776.",
        "slug": "deism",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "dissertation",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "An eighteenth-century scholarly essay; Paine's *Dissertation on First Principles of Government* (1795) is one of his most sustained essays on the franchise and representation.",
        "slug": "dissertation",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "excise",
        "aliases": ["exciseman"],
        "short": "The British indirect-tax service; Paine was an excise officer at Alford, Grantham, and Lewes for most of the 1760s and early 1770s, and his first published pamphlet (1772) petitioned for a pay raise for his colleagues.",
        "slug": "excise",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "federalist",
        "aliases": ["federalists"],
        "short": "The American political party of Hamilton, Adams, and Jay, in power 1789-1801; Paine's enemies for most of the years he was alive, posthumous slanderers thereafter.",
        "slug": "federalist",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "franchise",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The right to vote; Paine in *Rights of Man* and the *Dissertation on First Principles of Government* argued that it should not depend on owning property -- an argument a generation ahead of every existing democracy.",
        "slug": "franchise",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "franklin",
        "aliases": ["benjamin franklin"],
        "short": "Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): American printer, scientist, statesman; the man whose 1774 letters of introduction made Paine's American career possible.",
        "slug": "franklin",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "freethought",
        "aliases": ["freethinker"],
        "short": "An eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for unforced inquiry into religious questions, untethered to any creed; Paine became the patron saint of nineteenth-century Anglo-American freethought after his death.",
        "slug": "freethought",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "girondin",
        "aliases": ["girondins","girondists"],
        "short": "The moderate-republican faction in the 1792-93 French Convention, drafted the constitution Paine helped write; purged and largely guillotined by the Jacobins in 1793.",
        "slug": "girondin",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "headstrong club",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The Lewes debating society Paine joined in the late 1760s, meeting at the White Hart Inn; awarded a nightly Plumed Hat to whoever argued most stubbornly. Paine took home the Hat often.",
        "slug": "headstrong-club",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "hereditary",
        "aliases": ["hereditary government","hereditary right"],
        "short": "Of monarchy and aristocracy: rule passed by birth rather than choice; Paine's central political objection. 'All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny.' (*Rights of Man*, 1791)",
        "slug": "hereditary",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "independence",
        "aliases": ["declaration of independence"],
        "short": "The American break from Britain; *Common Sense* (January 1776) made the case the Continental Congress declared on July 4, 1776.",
        "slug": "independence",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "infidel",
        "aliases": ["infidelity"],
        "short": "Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for one who rejects revealed religion; Paine's enemies' favorite word for him after *The Age of Reason*.",
        "slug": "infidel",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "jacobin",
        "aliases": ["jacobins"],
        "short": "The radical-republican faction in the French Revolution, dominant 1793-94 under Robespierre, the faction that imprisoned Paine; named for the Dominican (Saint-Jacques) convent where they met.",
        "slug": "jacobin",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "jefferson",
        "aliases": ["thomas jefferson"],
        "short": "Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): Paine's close friend and political ally for 30 years; sent the U.S.S. *Maryland* to bring Paine home from France in 1802 and paid the Federalist political price for it.",
        "slug": "jefferson",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "lafayette",
        "aliases": ["marquis de lafayette"],
        "short": "Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834): French aristocrat, American Revolutionary general, gave Paine the Bastille key in 1790 to forward to Washington.",
        "slug": "lafayette",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "luxembourg",
        "aliases": ["luxembourg prison"],
        "short": "The converted Paris palace where Paine was imprisoned by the Committee of Public Safety from December 1793 to November 1794; he wrote *The Age of Reason* there.",
        "slug": "luxembourg",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "monarchy",
        "aliases": ["monarchical","monarchism"],
        "short": "Government by a single inherited ruler; Paine's lifelong adversary in *Common Sense*, *Rights of Man*, and the late constitutional writings.",
        "slug": "monarchy",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "natural rights",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Rights claimed to belong to all human beings by nature, before and beyond any government; the philosophical premise of *Rights of Man* and the American Declaration of Independence.",
        "slug": "natural-rights",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "new rochelle",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The Westchester County, New York town where the State of New York granted Paine a 277-acre confiscated Loyalist farm in 1785; his American home for the rest of his life and his original burial place.",
        "slug": "new-rochelle",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "new style",
        "aliases": ["old style","n.s.","o.s."],
        "short": "The Gregorian calendar (New Style) was adopted in Britain in 1752; before then Britain used the Julian calendar (Old Style), 11 days behind. Paine's January 29, 1737 birth (O.S.) is February 9, 1737 (N.S.).",
        "slug": "new-style",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "pamphlet",
        "aliases": ["pamphleteer"],
        "short": "A short, cheaply-printed political tract; the dominant medium of eighteenth-century public argument and the form that made Paine famous on three continents.",
        "slug": "pamphlet",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "philosophe",
        "aliases": ["philosophes"],
        "short": "An eighteenth-century French intellectual, especially of the Enlightenment generation that produced the *Encyclopedie*; Paine's natural intellectual habitat in Paris.",
        "slug": "philosophe",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "primogeniture",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "The legal doctrine that the eldest son inherits the entire estate; Paine attacked it in *Rights of Man* and Pennsylvania abolished it in the constitution he influenced.",
        "slug": "primogeniture",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "quaker",
        "aliases": ["quakerism","society of friends"],
        "short": "Member of the Religious Society of Friends, the dissenting Protestant tradition Paine's father belonged to; Paine kept the Quaker rejection of priestcraft and ceremony for life.",
        "slug": "quaker",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "raynal",
        "aliases": ["abbe raynal"],
        "short": "Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713-1796): French clergyman and historian whose *Revolution of America* (1781) Paine answered with his *Letter to the Abbe Raynal* (1782), one of his most cogent essays.",
        "slug": "raynal",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "revealed religion",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Religion held to rest on a particular divine revelation -- a scripture or set of miracles -- as opposed to natural religion or deism; the principal target of *The Age of Reason*.",
        "slug": "revealed-religion",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "rights of man",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Paine's two-part 1791-92 reply to Burke; Part II's program of progressive taxation, child allowances, old-age pensions, and public education was a century ahead of any government's practice.",
        "slug": "rights-of-man",
        "proper": true
      },{
        "term": "robespierre",
        "aliases": ["maximilien robespierre"],
        "short": "Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794): leader of the Jacobins and dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety; arrested Paine December 28, 1793, fell himself July 27, 1794.",
        "slug": "robespierre",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "sansculotte",
        "aliases": ["sansculottes","sans-culotte"],
        "short": "Literally 'without breeches' -- the Paris working-class radicals of the French Revolution who wore long trousers rather than aristocratic knee-breeches; the Convention's street base in 1793-94.",
        "slug": "sansculotte",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "silas deane",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Silas Deane (1737-1789): the American agent in Paris whom Paine, in a January 1779 public letter, accused of profiting from secret French aid; the accusation was correct but cost Paine his Foreign Affairs post.",
        "slug": "silas-deane",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "stake",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Paine's word in *Agrarian Justice* (1797) for the one-time payment of 15 pounds sterling he proposed every adult should receive at age 21; the first proposal in English of what is now called a universal capital grant.",
        "slug": "stake",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "thetford",
        "aliases": [],
        "short": "Town in Norfolk, England, where Paine was born January 29, 1737 (Old Style); a 'rotten borough' returning two MPs from a few hundred eligible voters, an early lesson in political corruption.",
        "slug": "thetford",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "tory",
        "aliases": ["tories","toryism"],
        "short": "Conservative supporters of crown and church in eighteenth-century British politics; the party Paine despised by instinct.",
        "slug": "tory",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "washington",
        "aliases": ["george washington"],
        "short": "George Washington (1732-1799): commander of the Continental Army; ordered *The American Crisis* No. I read to the troops at Trenton; later froze Paine out, prompting Paine's furious 1796 *Letter to George Washington*.",
        "slug": "washington",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "whig",
        "aliases": ["whigs"],
        "short": "British political party historically opposed to absolute monarchy and supportive of parliamentary supremacy; the eighteenth-century radicals' party of choice.",
        "slug": "whig",
        "proper": false
      },{
        "term": "wollstonecraft",
        "aliases": ["mary wollstonecraft"],
        "short": "Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): British philosopher, author of *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), and a member of Paine's London and Paris circles.",
        "slug": "wollstonecraft",
        "proper": false
      }]
}