Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195174861
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Since its publication in 1976, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America hasbeen recognized as a classic study of the career of the foremost politicalpamphleteer of the Age of Revolution, and a model of how to integrate thepolitical, intellectual, and social history of the struggle for Americanindependence.Foner skillfully brings together an account of Paine's remarkable career witha careful examination of the social worlds within which he operated, in GreatBritain, France, and especially the United States. He explores Paine's politicaland social ideas and the way he popularized them by pioneering a new form ofpolitical writing, using simple, direct language and addressing himself to areading public far broader than previous writers had commanded. He shows whichof Paine's views remained essentially fixed throughout his career, whiledirecting attention to the ways his stance on social questions evolved under thepressure of events. This enduring work makes clear the tremendous impact Paine'swriting exerted on the American Revolution, and suggests why he failed to have asimilar impact during his career in revolutionary France. And it offers newinsights into the nature and internal tensions of the republican outlook thathelped to shape the Revolution.In a new preface, Foner discusses the origins of this book and the influencesof the 1960s and 1970s on its writing. He also looks at how Paine has beenadopted by scholars and politicians of many stripes, and has even been calledthe patron saint of the Internet.
Author: Seth Cotlar
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.
Author: Thomas Paine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88
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Book Description
Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143112389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
A fresh new look at the Enlightenment intellectual who became the most controversial of America's founding fathers Despite his being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America," and the author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine is the least well known of America's founding fathers. This edifying biography by Craig Nelson traces Paine's path from his years as a London mechanic, through his emergence as the voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents, to his final days in the throes of dementia. By acquainting us as never before with this complex and combative genius, Nelson rescues a giant from obscurity-and gives us a fascinating work of history.
Author: Harvey J. Kaye
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374707065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462
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Book Description
This acclaimed biography “provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of [the Founding Father’s] controversial reputation” (Joseph J. Ellis, The New York Times Book Review). After leaving London for Philadelphia in 1774, Thomas Paine became one of the most influential political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Through writings like Common Sense, he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Harvey J. Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America fiercely traces the revolutionary spirit that runs through American history—and demonstrates how that spirit is rooted in Paine’s legacy. With passion and wit, Kaye shows how Paine turned Americans into radicals—and how we have remained radicals ever since.
Author: Howard Fast
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453234829
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The New York Times bestseller that’s “so glowingly human a picture of Tom Paine and America in the revolutionary days” (The New York Herald). Thomas Paine’s voice rang in the ears of eighteenth-century revolutionaries from America to France to England. He was friend to luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and William Wordsworth. His pamphlets extolling democracy sold in the millions. Yet he died a forgotten man, isolated by his rough manners, idealistic zeal, and unwillingness to compromise. Howard Fast’s brilliant portrait brings Paine to the fore as a legend of American history, and provides readers with a gripping narrative of modern democracy’s earliest days in America and Europe. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.
Author: John Keane
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802199534
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 855
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Book Description
“It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superseded . . . It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work.” —Terry Eagleton, The Guardian “More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world.” So begins John Keane’s magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy’s greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three bestselling books, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine’s life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. “[A] richly detailed . . . disciplined labor of scholarship and love, an exemplar of the rewards of a gargantuan effort at historical research. . . . In short, buy it; it’s definitive.” —Library Journal
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802143839
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. In this book, he demonstrates how Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the U.S.
Author: Edward Larkin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139445987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Although the impact of works such as Common Sense and The Rights of Man has led historians to study Thomas Paine's role in the American Revolution and political scientists to evaluate his contributions to political theory, scholars have tacitly agreed not to treat him as a literary figure. This book not only redresses this omission, but also demonstrates that Paine's literary sensibility is particularly evident in the very texts that confirmed his importance as a theorist. And yet, because of this association with the 'masses', Paine is often dismissed as a mere propagandist. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution recovers Paine as a transatlantic popular intellectual who would translate the major political theories of the eighteenth century into a language that was accessible and appealing to ordinary citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: William H Goetzmann
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786744235
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, "The birthday of a new world is at hand," America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world's first truly cosmopolitan civilization. In Beyond the Revolution, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America's greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another's ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture.
