Common Sense: 250th Anniversary Edition

Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in Philadelphia on January 9, 1776, is the most consequential pamphlet in American history. In the single year between July 1775 and July 1776, American colonists went from professing devotion to King George III to declaring themselves absolved of all allegiance to the British Crown. Common Sense was the chief catalyst for that change. In six months it transformed a continent of bewildered British subjects into a nation of republican Americans. This 25...