The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age
The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age
by Thomas Paine edited by Edward G. Gray foreword by Edward G. Gray
University of Chicago Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-0-226-65365-5 | Paper: 978-0-226-65351-8 Library of Congress Classification JC177.A5 2020 Dewey Decimal Classification 320.01
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Thomas Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist, and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine famously said, “try men’s souls.” Whatever your politics, if you’re seeking to understand the political world we live in, where better to look than Paine?
The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year’s worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure. Editor Edward G. Gray argues that we are living in a moment that Thomas Paine might recognize—or perhaps more precisely, a moment desperate for someone whose rhetoric can ignite a large-scale social and political transformation. Paine was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic aperçu, and this book offers a sleek and approachable sampler of some of the sharpest bits from his oeuvre. As Paine himself says in the entry for January 20: “The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflexion.” The Daily Thomas Paine should prove equally incendiary and inspirational for contemporary readers with an eye for politics, even those who prefer the tweet to the pamphlet.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Edward G. Gray is professor of history at Florida State University and coeditor of the University of Chicago Press series American Beginnings 1500–1900. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an activist, philosopher, political theorist, and author of Common Sense, The American Crisis, and Rights of Man.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
A Brief Thomas Paine Chronology
The Daily Thomas Paine
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
Editor Bio
Acknowledgments
Index of Sources
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