Letter to George Washington: The Most Disputed Piece in the Canon
Conway prints it. Foner prints it. Most popular Paine anthologies cut it. The case for and against keeping the Letter in the canon turns on a question deeper than the Letter...
From the Blog
Essays & Commentary
Reflections on Paine's ideas, his legacy, and the enduring relevance of freethought.
Why Common Sense Was Anonymous
The first Bell printing said only Written by an Englishman. The second printing said the same. By the third, the secret was out, and Paine never wrote anonymously again.
The Age of Reason and Modern Atheism
Hitchens read it in his teens. Dawkins put a Paine epigraph at the front of The God Delusion. Modern atheism has a Painite genealogy that runs through deism into something else.
Paine and Washington
He read it to the troops on the night of December 23, 1776. Twenty years later he wrote the most savage public letter of his career, and the friendship was over.
Paine and Jefferson
Of the founding generation, Jefferson is the only one who never abandoned Paine. The correspondence runs over thirty years and ends only with Paine's death.
Bones in a Trunk: Cobbett, 1819
He arrived at the New Rochelle farm at midnight, with two laborers and a lantern. The grave had been there for ten years. The coffin was where it should have been.
Agrarian Justice and Universal Basic Income
Paine wrote it in Paris in the winter of 1795-96, between the Luxembourg and the long return to America. It is the strangest thing he ever wrote, and the most prescient.
What Burke Got Right
Paine won the pamphlet war. That does not mean he won the argument. The reasons Burke wrote Reflections are still the reasons revolutions go bad.
Paine in Paris: The Year He Almost Died
The chalk mark went on the wrong side of his door. The squad came by at dawn for the men they thought he was.