Thomas Paine

The pamphleteer’s insistence that America live up to its revolutionary vows still rings true 250 years later.

The debate over Paine's legacy today is a proxy for a much larger debate over whose vision gets to govern.

The constitutional ideas in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet.

How a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence unlocked a historical mystery.

“How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

Thomas Paine, the most radical of American revolutionaries, perhaps most fully understood the millennial potential of the new Republic.

Why is there still no memorial to Paine, the immigrant whose writing galvanized the American Revolution?

Even after the fighting started, it took years before American Patriots started calling their cause a “revolution.”

Americans have long imagined that they set off a global age of revolt. Seen within the era’s wider wars of empire, the story looks rather different.

Why 1776 became the year Americans declared themselves an independent nation.

Thomas Paine nearly died quarantined off in Philadelphia in 1774. Then a Loyalist doctor nursed him back to health.

Despite its failures and limitations, the American Revolution unleashed popular aspirations to throw off tyranny of all kinds.

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress.

On the beginnings of our stories—and the history of who owns them.

The problem with progressive intellectuals looking to the nation's founders for progressive models.