Common Sense The Unabridged and Complete Edition (Thomas Paine Classics)

And then a guy named Thomas Paine who wrote the book common sense, but he was one of the founding fathers. Great, great things. But Thomas Paine wrote a series of pamphlets because he knew that they needed to motivate that percentage of Americans who did not want to go against England to motivate him to do something about it. And so he wrote something called the American crisis.

You read Common Sense by Thomas Paine. You read Lincoln's speeches. You listen to Fannie Lou Hamer.

You read Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine, 1776. Common sense. I'll show you what I mean in a minute.

Remember Thomas Paine? Common Sense, one of the great works of writing that convinced a lot of the colonists.

The cause of America was truth, liberty, and freedom, inalienable rights granted by God. Those were objective, not subjective, truths.

at the beginning of 1776 thomas paine releases common sense it sells an astonishing 120 000 copies in its first three months again there are only 2.5 million citizens of the colonies at the time non-slave non-native american citizens

It's funny you say that because I often think about how when Thomas Paine writes Common Sense in The Leader of the Revolutionary War he's on the radical fringes of the people who are agitating and he was a real committed small-D Democrat particularly compared to his cohort.

And I was able to just explore the world through the internet and see what America is like and what the values of America were. So when all of that civil wars was happening, I was sitting at home reading Thomas Jefferson and The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine and Common Sense and stuff like that.

an asylum for mankind, a quote from Common Sense.

The other thing just to think about is what's on trial here is something that this is the winter in 1776 when Thomas Payne wrote Common Sense and then later the American Crisis, these pamphlets that really crystallized the American Revolution that gave us the system that we wanted to defend.

this is the winter in 1776 when thomas pain wrote common sense and then later the american crisis these pamphlets that really crystallized the american revolution they gave us the system that we wanted to fend he wrote that people say where's the king of america

thomas pain lived and collected taxes he was a tax collector about 15 miles from where i'm sitting now and there's a pub called the age of reason that he used to go to

I know about common sense. I know that this war is a conflict much bigger than our farm, our state. The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.

The pamphlet that stirred Martin's grandfather, Common Sense, would become the first American bestseller.

The bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about.

The bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about.

This was a pamphlet that many, many colonial Americans heard about, which is a remarkable thing considering how anemic the kind of media infrastructure was at the time.

The bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about.

That book, that pamphlet was read aloud in taverns and churches and city halls and squares across the country and was probably in terms of a kind of cultural zeitgeist or what we would call a kind of water cooler moment where everybody is talking about the same piece of media was probably as galvanizing and as momentous and as influential and as broad of a readership as any book since, you know, Harry Potter, Taylor Swift, whatever kind of contemporary examples we could think of.

The bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about.

And sort of relatedly, the bestseller in colonial America was Thomas Paine's Common Sense and exactly what you're talking about. The colonial population was still largely illiterate, but that book, that pamphlet was read aloud in taverns and churches and city halls and squares across the country and was probably in terms of a kind of cultural zeitgeist or what we would call a kind of water cooler moment where everybody is talking about the same piece of media was probably as galvanizing and as momentous and as influential and as broad of a readership as any book since, you know, Harry Potter, Taylor Swift, whatever kind of contemporary examples we could think of.