Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Through writings like Common Sense--and words such as "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth," "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," and "These are the times that try men's souls"--He not only turned America's colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Harvey J. Kaye demonstrates, articulated...

"Iconoclastic historian and bestselling author Kevin Phillips punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775--Congress's belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England's 'rage militaire,' the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and hundreds of local committees that...

Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times bestselling 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...

John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that "history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine." Thomas Edison called him "the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible." He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, "The United States of America." He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era's intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his...

"In The Great Debate Yuval Levin explores the origins of the familiar left/right divide in American politics by examining the views of the men who best represent each side of that debate: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the origins of our political order, Levin shows that our political divide did not originate (as many historians argue) in the French Revolution, but rather in the Anglo-American debate about that revolution....

Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen chronicle the political and military careers of three important Americans, including their pivotal roles in the American Revolutionary War. Here, Gingrich and Forstchen reveal how Thomas Paine championed the case for freedom, while General George Washington and Private Jonathan Van Dorn fought the good fight on the front lines.