The Religion Plan
From the lecture circuit's earliest broadside to the major debates with Gladstone and Manning. The shape of nineteenth-century unbelief, in his own words.
Themed Itineraries
Reading Plans
A syllabus is easier to finish than an archive. Each plan below is ten works on one theme, sequenced from gentle to demanding. A plan a month; a year of Paine.
The Liberty Plan
Free speech, free conscience, free thought, the throughline of his entire public life, from the war years through his last lecture circuit.
The Domestic Plan
Paine was decades ahead of his contemporaries on women's rights, divorce, child-rearing, and marriage. This plan gathers the strongest of those pieces in sequence.
The Tribute Plan
Paine's most beautiful prose lives in his eulogies and tributes. Read in sequence, they form a portrait of nineteenth-century freethought through its heroes.
The Political Plan
The Reconstruction lawyer, the campaign orator, and the plumed-knight Republican. The political career is half the man.
The Science Plan
Darwin had just landed when Paine began lecturing. These ten pieces show him absorbing the new science and turning it into popular argument.
Each plan is a suggestion, not a syllabus you must obey. Skip; reread; reorder. The point is that the canon should feel surveyable.