Thomas Paine Day Alone
I celebrated Thomas Paine’s birthday for the first time in 2010. It was an inspired impulse, almost a whim. I bought a dozen red roses
Thomas Paine Friends
Thomas Paine Friends is a website that in addition to celebrating Thomas Paine, also seeks to be part of a larger discussion about how Americans think and talk about and remember our national past.
“Wicked and Seditious” — Paine’s Rights of Man
In honor of Banned Books Week , I decided earlier this month to revisit Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Originally published in England as two separate pamphlets (in March 1791 and February 1792), the 200-page book is still widely considered Paine’s most important and influential work. It is also, according to the American Library Association “one
The Thomas Paine Fan Club No. 1 — Messages from the Past
I ordered the book from Amazon. The seller had noted that it was a library discard. Still, an actual copy of something published in 1863, for less than fifty dollars, seemed like a steal. It came to me rebound in one of those heavy institutional covers – plain black, stamped in bright gold letters along
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Poem: Tom Paine’s Bones
Tom Paine’s Bonesby C. Bichler(2009, revised 2018) This is you,Tom Paine this living Americawhere your bonesno longer rest I imagine youlaughingon whatever cosmic planeyou currently inhabitscissors and tapestuck in your back pocketas in some 200-year-oldcaricature. These are toolsfor taking the measureof the world – of the space between worlds A circleof an inch diameterhas the
Henry Redhead Yorke and Thomas Paine
Editor’s Introduction: In honor of Thomas Paine’s birthday, I thought it would be fun — and highly appropriate — to consider Paine, not as Founding Father and historical icon, but simply as a human being. I discovered the following essay by Henry Redhead Yorke while reading W.T. Sherwin’s Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (1819) –
Beginning the World Over Again: Ian Ruskin’s Thomas Paine Returns to Public Television
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, a pamphlet of less than fifty pages, published in January of 1776, months before the Declaration of Independence was drafted. In clear and robust prose, Paine urged his fellow Americans to do the unthinkable, the impossible – to
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Hope and Virtue: A Tale of Two Big Words
This is a President Obama story, an Inauguration Day story. It is also a Thomas Paine story. While sifting through the random items that somehow made it from my old house to my new(ish) apartment this past December, I came across a large button celebrating the 2009 inauguration of then-new President Barack Obama. Round, bright
“I have no wish to believe on the subject.”
On this day in 1809, more than 200 years ago, Thomas Paine died in what is now Greenwich Village, New York. Plagued during the last weeks of his life by “visitors” – some of whom forced entry into his rooms – who sought to convert him from deism to Christianity, Paine held firm to his
a completely made-up true story…
I came across this story — really a fragment — written out longhand in one of my journals. I had forgotten I’d written it, but it seemed exactly the piece with which to launch this blog, which is all about the intersections between story and history. Sigh. “I can’t do this anymore, Thomas.” The bewigged
“The glide of the smallest fish…”
It’s tough to choose a favorite quote by Thomas Paine — American Founder, career revolutionary, and perennial skeptic. Pithy sayings and memorable phrases are Paine’s stock-in-trade, from “We have in it in our power to begin the world over again” to “These are the times that try men’s souls” and even “United States of America”