On this page:
1. FAQS
2. Audio and Podcasts
3. Recommended Biographies
4. Resource Essays
FAQs
FAQs
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Was Thomas Paine a “failure” before coming to America?
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Why isn’t Paine recognized as a leading figure of the American Revolution?
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Which is correct “Tom Paine” or “Thomas Paine”?
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Where are Paine’s remains, and does he have a gravesite?
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What was Thomas Paine’s stance on Women’s Rights?
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What was Thomas Paine’s stance on slavery?
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What was Paine’s role in the French Revolution?
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What was Paine’s role in the American Revolution?
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What is Paine‘s position on the separation of church and state?
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Was Thomas Paine an anarchist?
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Was Thomas Paine an American citizen?
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Was Thomas Paine a socialist?
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Did Paine die penniless?
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Was Thomas Paine a disheveled drunk?
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Was Paine the real author of the Declaration of Independence?
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Was Paine present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787?
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Was Paine in favor of a redistribution of wealth?
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Is it true that Thomas Paine first coined the phrase, “The United States of America?”
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Does Thomas Paine have any descendants?
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Did Thomas Paine support the U.S. Constitution?
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Did Thomas Paine make corsets for a living?
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Did Thomas Paine live in Bordentown?
Audio and Podcasts
From the archives of the Thomas Paine Society, UK, we are proud to share a lecture from the senior historian in and of Lewes Colin Brent. Here Brent speaks about the legacy of Thomas Paine at a 2009 festival in Lewes, UK that waas held to mark the 200th Anniversary of Thomas Paine’s death. Here is the audio from that lecture in four parts:
Recommended Biographies
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Foner’s Introduction to the Collected Works
At a time when men and women are fighting to realize that type of world it would be well to read again the words of Thomas Paine who wrote so much and so well to build the heritage of freedom we are battling to preserve and extend.
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The Hall Manuscripts, ed.
In 1785, John Hall, an able mechanician and admirable man, emigrated from Leicester, England, to Philadelphia. He carried letters to Paine, who found him a man after his own heart. I am indebted to his relatives.
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Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. I.
The phantasmal Paine cleared away, my polemic ends. I have endeavored to portray the real Paine, and have brought to light some things unfavorable to him which his enemies had not discovered, and, I believe, could never have discovered.
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The Cobbett Papers, ed.
It being an essential part of our plan to let Thomas Paine speak in his own words, and explain himself the reason for his actions, whenever we find written papers in his own hand, we shall insert such and to estimate the slightest circumstances.
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Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. II
DUMAS’ hero, Dr. Gilbert (in “Ange Pitou”), an idealization of Paine, interprets his hopes and horrors on the opening of the fateful year 1793. Dr. Gilbert’s pamphlets helped to found liberty in the New World, but sees that it may prove the germ of total ruin to the Old World.
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Thomas Paine (1892)
This man had gratified no ambition at the expense of his fellow-men; he had desolated no country with the flame and sword of war; he had not wrung millions from the poor and unfortunate; he had betrayed no trust, and yet he was almost universally despised.
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Thomas Paine (1870)
At the age of seventy-three, death touched his tired heart. He died in the land his genius defended — under the flag he gave to the skies. Slander cannot touch him now — hatred cannot reach him more.
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Life of Thomas Paine
Immediately on the death of Mr. Paine, Cheetham, his political enemy, began to collect materials for his life, which was published the same year. We have already noticed the manner in which he collected those materials.
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Linton’s “Life of Paine”
The object of the present work is to place before the public, at a low price, a concise and impartial history of the life of Thomas Paine; so that the people who have been so grossly misled in regard to his real character.
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Life of Thomas Paine
The two following letters are explanatory of the reasons why the publication of the life of Mr. Paine has been so long delayed, and are so well calculated to excite the candor of the reader toward the work, that no apology is offered for making them a part of the preface.
Resource Essays
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Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy
Thomas Paine’s strong antislavery stand was hardly appreciated and often unknown to those “in the trenches,” the 19th century abolitionists who were actually fighting the peculiar institution in antebellum America. Reasons for this ignorance can easily be found.
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Burying Thomas Paine
The great historian E. H. Carr said, “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.” In an essay published as part of a collection of writings by and about Thomas Paine, J. C. D. Clark has pushed this premise to absurd limits.
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Thomas Paine and the Declaration of Independence
Van Buren Denslow said of Paine: “If a set of opinions could be entitled to a place among political philosophers by reasons of millions having come to believe in and praise them, then Paine would stand, more than any other, as the founder of the American school of political philosophy.”
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The Adventures of Thomas Paine’s Bones
If we pass from personal relics to relics of personality, those of Paine are innumerable; and among these the most important are the legends and fictions told concerning him by enemies, unconscious that their romances were really tributes to his unique influence.
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How Paine Transformed Locke
Thomas Paine was the most prodigious political and social polemicist of the revolutionary era. His thinking is more original and seminal than he has been given credit for by historians. Its scope is immense which is one of many reasons he is much more than a “Political Propagandist” and “Pamphleteer”.
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Here’s to Tom Paine—the Forgotten Founding Father
Even with the passing of 215 years, Paine is still a relatively unknown figure despite his bestselling pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) which urged Americans to declare independence, and his popular American Crisis papers (1776–1783).
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Thomas Paine’s View of Constitutions
Paine purposed to realize for every individual, as much as possible, the God-given natural rights and liberty of mankind. Such a goal for any nation, Paine believed, is best and most easily accomplished through the agency of a constitution that by its sequence of adoption and substantive content.
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‘Common Sense’ and the American Revolution
We should never fail to recount the story of the American Revolution. We should never forget that our nation was forged in struggle, a struggle — however inadequate and in need of continual renewal and advancement — that was revolutionary.
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“Common Sense” and its Meaning Today
When power is concentrated in the hands of the few that, by very definition, is an example of tyranny. To allow oil companies, the trucking industry, or whatever to do whatever they want because we believe that they will do the right thing is to fall into the trap.
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Applied Science of Thomas Paine
More than a change of “persons and measures”, the nascent United States embodied in one nation of free and independent states a change of principles and synthesis of ideas that marked out a position on which to freely apply the lever of reason. We see this in hindsight.
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Lewis Lapham Speech at the 2012 International Conference for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College
The sale of 150,000 copies within a matter of months furnished Thomas Jefferson with the proof of a national resolve that encouraged him to fit Paine’s reasoning to the writing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
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Link to Louse’s “Unwashed Infidelity”
An academic article by Mark A. Lause published in Labor History (1986) that connects Paine’s radical ideas, particularly his critiques of aristocracy and calls for common-sense republicanism, to the emerging working-class consciousness and early labor movements in NYC.
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Thomas Paine’s Legacy of Equality
Paine used Common Sense to convince the American colonists that to be fully independent and free, the King and what he stood for had to be discarded. A republican form of government had to replace monarchy and nobility.
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Thomas Paine as Political Theorist
Paine means to rouse the emotions; but unlike many a Romantic, he means to stir us to accept and act primarily upon rational principles and historic evidence. Paine does not represent simply a transition between politico-religious and politico-economic theory: he combines them.
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How ‘American’ was Thomas Paine?
Paine’s ideas about his own national consciousness evolved from this time onward in ways that paralleled the way in which Americans were thinking about themselves. In 1776, he understood that a true national consciousness had to move beyond politics and constitution making.
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The van der Weyde — T. Roosevelt Letters
The correspondence between Colonel Roosevelt and myself on the subject of Thomas Paine is in the main so directly to the point that an explanatory foreword is hardly necessary. There are nevertheless some matters touched upon in these letters concerning which a few additional words will be of value.
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The Age of Paine
If Paine would feel at home there, he would also fight to protect this nascent medium. Learning what had happened to the media he founded as corporations moved in, he would spot commercialization as Danger Number One.
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Congressional Testimony of Fred Friendly
If ever an individual deserved a place of prominence as a preeminent American it is Thomas Paine. If we had to point to one person who invented the language of the Revolution, it was Thomas Paine.
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“Rights of Man” in America
The Rights of Man won an audience in the 1790’s because the Federalists in power moved away from accommodation towards coercion. Federalists strung the “strings” which Rights of Man could “vibrate”.
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Thomas Paine Fights for Freedom by Richard Gimbel
Succeeding generations have seen the smoke screen of personal abuse around Paine gradually disappear, allowing him to stand forth as the greatest advocate of democracy, social security and freedom of thought the world has yet seen.
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The Fate of Thomas Paine
Paine, though prominent in two revolutions and almost hanged for attempting to raise a third, is grown, in our day, somewhat dim. To our great grandfathers, he seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive infidel rebellious alike against his God and his King.
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New Political Writings of Thomas Paine
Paine frequently stated that he was not a member of any political party, but it is apparent from the following letters and the anonymous articles, that he took a more active part than has hitherto been known in helping the Republican (Jeffersonian) Party.
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Tom Paine—Revolutionist
Paine’s talents were based on another quality: he was a revolutionary thinker, honest, courageous, and prepared to go to the root of things. As he put it: “When precedents fail to assist us, we must return to the first principles of things for information, and think as if we were the first men that thought.”
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Thomas Paine’s Citizenship Record
Questions of citizenship, naturalization, domicile and even residence do present perplexing problems in the field of law. But the soundness of Ward’s challenge may be determined today by marshaling the facts on the one hand and then applying the law as it then existed.
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The Philosophy of Thomas Paine by Thomas Edison
Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking because he is unknown to the average citizen. I might say that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed those impressive words, ‘the United States of America.’
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Thomas Paine, Pathfinder
The progress of science and invention in which Paine was so deeply interested has not of itself brought social peace or justice. We have got rid of chattel slavery against which he preached, but not of slavery to a profit mad economic system which he could not foresee.
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Thomas Paine
Paine was the real founder of the so-called Liberal Denominations, and their business has not been to become great, powerful and popular, but to make all other denominations more liberal. So today in all so-called orthodox pulpits one can hear the ideas of Paine.