Features

55 Works

The Conway Edition (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1894-96), four volumes, transcribed from Cornell's Internet Archive scans and verified against the cleaner Project Gutenberg releases. Browse the canon five different ways.

• The complete index
• Start here -- five works to read first
• Editor's spotlight
• Reading paths
• A-Z index
• By year
• By category
• A random work
• Browse by topic

A Real Reader's Panel

Adjust font size, line height, line width, and theme. A live table of contents tracks your position; a top-of-page progress bar shows how far you've read.

• Light + dark mode (follows your system)
• Drop caps and serif typography
• Sticky TOC with active-section tracking
• Reading progress bar

Notes & Highlights

Select any passage to highlight it. Add a private note. Save a work for later. Everything is stored locally in your browser -- no account, no login, nothing leaves your device.

• Your notes & highlights
• Saved readings
• Reading calendar

Full-Text Search

Press / from anywhere to open the search popup. The full corpus -- every work, every essay, every reference page -- is indexed for instant lookup, all client-side.

• Open the full search page

Biography & Reference

Beyond the writings: a year-by-year timeline plotted on an interactive map, a calendar of his life, family tree, circle of friends and rivals, the lineage that shaped him, and his published debates.

• Biography
• Timeline & map
• This day in his life
• Family tree
• Connections
• Influences
• Legacy
• Revolutionary cities
• Gallery
• Debates

Hover-Tip Reference

Eighteenth-century terms, figures, and ideas, defined inline with hover tooltips throughout the works, and browsable A-Z on dedicated pages.

• Glossary -- A-Z terms
• Gazetteer -- people & places

Six Export Formats

Every work ships a built-in citation generator (APA / MLA / Chicago / BibTeX) plus six machine-readable downloads -- TXT, JSON, BibTeX, RIS (for Zotero / EndNote / Mendeley), TEI P5 XML, and a print view. Volume-level zip bundles ride on top.

• How to cite the Conway Edition
• Per-work downloads index (JSON)
• Zotero translator

Library-Grade Discovery

Stable identifiers, machine-readable surfaces, and the OAI-PMH 2.0 protocol the Digital Public Library of America and university catalogs harvest from. Plus a curated bibliography, classroom guidance, and manuscript-watch index of physical holdings.

• For researchers
• For the classroom
• Manuscript watch
• Curated bibliography
• OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint
• Data & APIs hub

Concept Graph

An interactive chord diagram of how the twelve concept categories (liberty, monarchy, reason, conscience, slavery, …) share works across the canon.

• Concept graph (chord diagram)
• Topic index

No Tracking, No Accounts

Privacy-respecting analytics only (no cookies, no third-party trackers). Fonts served by GDPR-compliant Bunny Fonts. All personal data -- notes, highlights, reading history -- stays in your browser.

Built to Web Standards

WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility (axe-clean across all routes), semantic HTML, visible focus rings, and full keyboard navigation. Respects prefers-reduced-motion. Works on any modern browser, any screen size.

• Accessibility statement

RSS & Feeds

Follow new essays and additions to the archive in any reader.

• Main feed
• This day in Paine's life (JSON Feed)

Site Map & Tech Stack

For the orienteer: a complete human-readable list of every page on the site, plus a deep dive into how the archive is built for the technically curious.

• Human-readable sitemap
• Tech stack
• Colophon
• Visual style guide
• Works API (JSON)

A Daily Anchor

The home page surfaces an event from his life that happened on this date -- a small daily window into the man behind the writings. Browse the full month-by-month calendar on its own page.

• This day in his life