By Scott Cleary, PhD
A Canadian who grew up outside Toronto, I first heard of Thomas Paine very briefly in high school when my Canadian history classes spent as little time as possible on the American Revolution. That was more about the Loyalist expulsion to Canada than the achievement of American independence.
My next encounter with Paine came about 20 years ago when I applied for my current job as a professor of English at the university in New Rochelle. I had earned my Ph.D. in 18th-century literature, so I was applying for the 18th-century literature job at a university in New Rochelle. I noticed the Thomas Paine Cottage and museum were fairly close to campus. In my job interview, I asked about the relationship between the Paine sites and school. They replied that there was no relationship, and I noted to myself that if I got the job, I would like to try to build that relationship.
Fast forward to 2009 and the first stirrings for transferring archival materials from the TPHA Memorial Building to the university library. I met Gary Berton then. His knowledge and passion about Paine was contagious. We helped start the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona and we organized in 2012 the first International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies.
This was a real watershed for me. In so many ways, it launched me fully into my Thomas Paine research. That conference allowed me to edit New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies (Palgrave, 2016), the collection of essays arising from that conference.
At that 2012 conference, over lunches and coffee, we began to work and plan for what’s become Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton, 2026), the six-volume scholarly edition of Paine’s works and correspondence, which will definitively re-write the conventional early-American narratives about Paine. Historians have so much wrong, and we are about to correct the record, which is exactly the original goal of the TPHA.
I will never forget the day after the conference when I looked at the table of contents in Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of Paine’s works. One section listed Paine’s “songs and poems,” and I knew I had a unique connection to Paine. My academic specialty is poetry, so I decided to write a book on Paine and his poetry, which I’ve done, “The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry” (Virginia, 2019).
Paine used poetry throughout his life — in print and manuscripts — to explore political ideology as well as human feelings. That’s what makes Paine so interesting, compelling and fascinating to me.