Thomas paine biography book

Description

Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of God Is Not Great has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, the world's foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the day of publication in , Declaration of the Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative commentator, Hitchens is a political descendent of the great pamphleteer. In this engaging work he demonstrates how

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Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations

September 21,

“How could the American people ignore this hero who had convinced their ancestors to renounce the depraved government of their home land and build a new world? This author who had conceived and written the very principles on which their nation was founded? This theorist whose writings were the very essence of what it meant to be an American? This man who had fought so publicly for decades over the United States’ very right to exist as something beyond an abused and belittled colony?”

One could make a fairly convincing argument that it is Thomas Paine, not George Washington, who deserves the moniker “Father of Our Country.” If Washington was the engineer of American independence then it was Thomas Paine who was its architect.

Thanks in no small part to Christopher Hitchens, I have read at least five books written by or about Mr. Paine. He, like Orwell and Nietzsche and Plath, has become some

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Thomas Paine

American philosopher and author (–)

For other people with the same name, see Thomas Paine (disambiguation).

Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain;^[1] February 9, [O.S. January 29, ]^{[Note 1]} – June 8, ) was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, and political philosopher.^[2][3] He authored Common Sense () and The American Crisis (–), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he helped to inspire the colonial erapatriots in to declare independence from Great Britain.^[4] His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights.^[5]

Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, and immigrated to the British American colonies in with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every American Patriot read his page pamphlet Common Sense,^[6][7] which