In 1964, there was political opposition to the erection of Paine’s statue outside King’s House in Thetford, UK which was a gift from the American Thomas Paine Foundation. The controversy led to the foundation of the Thomas Paine Society UK with a goal of promoting a better understanding of the man and his work. The Thomas Paine Society UK became the premier Thomas Paine historical society in the UK. In 2025, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association merged with the Thomas Paine Society UK to form the internationally-focused Thomas Paine Historical Association. This is the archive of the Thomas Paine Society UK Bulletin from 1965 to 2013.
In so far as I know, though I stand to be corrected, until this book appeared, no work of substance on Paine has appeared in Portugal, though I have seen references to some of Paine’s works being translated into Portuguese.
Paine admired the teachings of Jesus, and he went to great lengths to free them from smothering additions, which had been drawn from the mythology of ancient cults and grafted onto them by the churchmakers who usurped Jesus’s role of teacher.
David Vincent in his introduction refers to the quite unprecedented circulation in the 1790s of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Its dangerous truth; in explaining the corrupt state of the British government.
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The intellectual condition of England at the time when Thomas Paine entered the world in 1737 and for many years afterwards is well described by Friedrich Engels: ‘The peasants at that time used to lead a quiet, peaceful life of honest piety harassed by few worries.”
With the evidence presented, it is not inconceivable that Paine, with remarkable perception and clearheaded purpose, wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. In view of his denunciation of slavery, literary style and similarity of his essay to the deflated clause, the theory of his authorship is plausible.
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Once the War of Independence was ended no other English emigrant who had fought in the War, to my knowledge, was accused of being a “traitor” to his country of origin. But Paine was a dangerous political writer and the ‘traitor” myth is maintained.
Not unnaturally both these publications are concerned with the political philosophies adopted by each group, with the Anarchists being the rather more confused due to their habit of adopting different tendencies. However, both books deserve mention.
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ERIC FONER HAS GIVEN us a book which is both challenging and provocative. It would overcome the limits of prior interpretations of Thomas Paine with a new understanding of the pamphleteer and his works, trace the “roots” of his political thought.
BOOK REVIEW: Tom Paine And Revolutionary America Read Post »
The meteoric political career of Thomas Paine was so dazzling that it has largely eclipsed the events of his formative years during which he obtained the expertise and developed the tenacity that enabled him to respond to the opportunity afforded by the rapid changes in the American colonies.
Well after hitting out what does one make of the book as it stands? Well it’s good, even if it deals in the main with the familiar. It’s worth getting, although I am uncertain as to what section of the reading populace towards which it is directed.
Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in The Age of Reason he shows he had gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.
Paine’s Rights of Man was prosecuted for libel not so much because of its contents but because, rather than confining his audience to ‘the judicious reader’, he had addressed ‘the lowest orders of the people – people who…cannot from their education or situation in ‘life, be supposed to understand the. subject on which he writes.’
