Paine Rights Of Man

Craig Nelson. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations. Viking Adult, 2006
0670037885 Book in As New condition with black remainder mark on bottom edge. From Publishers Weekly Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine would be pleased with this brisk, intellectually sophisticated study of his life. Nelson (The First Heroes) breezes through Paine's first 37 years, his attention tuned to 1774, when Paine moved from England to Philadelphia, bearing glowing letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. It was there that "his real life story would begin" with the writing of the hugely influential Common Sense, which attacked the divine right of kings and advocated American independence. Nelson follows Paine as he heads to Europe in 1787, and charts Paine's ambiguous relationship with the French Revolution. During the Reign of Terror, Paine got to work on The Age of Reason, and Nelson insists that, though his subject has been called an atheist, this work advocated 18th-century deism and was right in step with "mainstream Anglo-American religious discourse" of the era. Nelson concludes with a brief, intriguing discussion of Paine's legacy in the United States. The descriptions of Paine birthday galas in New York and Philadelphia 20 years after his 1809 death are fascinating?in fact, an entire chapter could have been devoted to Paine's influence in the Jacksonian era. This volume won't replace Eric Foner's classic Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, but it's a welcome addition. (Sept. 25) Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Shortly after arriving in the American colonies in 1774, Thomas Paine wrote the pamphlet "Common Sense," which was instrumental in pushing the colonies to declare independence. After independence was declared, his "16 Crisis" papers helped keep up the morale of American soldiers. Yet Paine is rarely accorded the adulation or even respect given to those deemed our Founding Fathers. To a degree, that is a result of Federalist politicians; frightened by his devotion to democratic principles and his support for revolution in France, they took every opportunity to disparage him as a rabble-rousing atheist. Nelson admirably restores Paine and his ideas to a deserved place of prominence. Above all else, Paine was a man of the Enlightenment. He went to France in 1787, defended the revolution in its early stages, but strongly opposed the descent into bloody extremism. He barely escaped execution during the Terror and died in obscurity in New York in 1809. However, his ideas stressing the virtues of democratic republicanism and his optimism for the future of America remained influential. Jay Freeman Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved Book Description Despite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase ?United States of America,? and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known ? and the most controversial ? of the American founding fathers. Unlike such friends and allies as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, the world?s first crusader for the public good has always remained a somewhat indistinct figure. How this lower- class British tradesman managed not only to have written the cornerstone of American democracy, Common Sense, but become a revered citizen of the world are questions that have challenged historians for centuries, and have more often than not left us with biographies that are more monumental than illuminating. In Craig Nelson?s Thomas Paine we now have a rich and vivid portrait that does justice to this towering figure of our history, one that brings him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the heady intellectual exhilaration of the Age of Enlightenment. Nelson traces Paine?s path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey to seek his fortune in the New World (in which he arrived on a stretcher, after a nearly deadly bout of shipboard typhus); from his early career as a crusading pamphleteer to his emergence as the heroic voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents; from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris during The Terror to his final years in America, where the once-lionized patriot spent his final days nearly impoverished and in the throes of dementia. Throughout his insightful portrait Nelson takes full account of this paradoxical figure, whom some contemporaries judged as brilliant and charismatic and others disparaged as abrasive and egotistical, a cherished patriot who was nonetheless dismissed by John Adams as a ?disastrous meteor? and Teddy Roosevelt as a ?dirty little atheist.? Five years in the making, drawing on both the most recent scholarship and the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Paris, London, Lewes, and Thetford, Thomas Paine restores this often misunderstood man to the stature that he deserves, and reveals him, a man who famously asserted that ?we have it in our power to begin the world over again,? to be as much a man of our own time as a paragon of the Enlightenment. BACKCOVER: ?Thomas Paine has had many biographers, but this is the first book to recover him in his own electrical style. Nelson's account brings Paine to life with all the flaws and foibles flaming away amidst the greatness. The story is poignant and the prose is incandescent.? ?Joseph J. Ellis, author, most recently, of His Excellency: George Washington From the Back Cover "Thomas Paine has had many biographers, but this is the first book to recover him in his own electrical style. Nelson's account brings Paine to life with all the flaws and foibles flaming away amidst the greatness. The story is poignant and the prose is incandescent." ?Joseph J. Ellis, author, most recently, of His Excellency: George Washington About the Author Craig Nelson is the author of four previous books, including The First Heroes and Let's Get Lost. His writings have appeared in Salon, The New England Review, Blender, Genre, and a host of other publications. He was an editor at HarperCollins, Hyperion, and Random House for almost twenty years and has been profiled by Variety, Interview, Manhattan, Inc., and Time Out. 4 of 5 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars The Founder Most of Us Never Knew!, May 6, 2007 By Kevin S Currie (Eldersburg, MD United States) - To parahphrase the Rod Stewart song, some guys - some founders - have all the luck. Today, bookstore history sections are littered with biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton; even the long neglected Adams and Franklin have experienced their just resurgence. Yet, there have been precious few biographies (or even books with large portions devoted to) Thomas Paine, one of history's great provocateurs and a prime mover of both the American and French Revolutions. Craig Nelson, though, has written a very throrough, gripping work that will hopefully restore Paine to the eminence that he knew during his lifetime. Wait! Did I just say, "the eminence he knew during his lifetime"? Most of us, after all, were taught that Paine was a man who America (and everyone else) had a love/hate relationship - a lower-caste rabble rouser that was, at most, pretty well liked in his early years, and violently dismissed in his later years. This latter part - this dismissal of Paine in his later years - is true by Nelson's book. But Nelson is concerned to highlight the fact that not only was Paine liked during his heydays in America, Britian, and France, but he was truly adored. Every single pamphlet he wrote - American Crises, Common Sense, Rights of Man (first and second), and Age of Reason - was more cherished than, and outsold, the previous. If anyone disliked Paine, it was the upper caste of society. Paine, after all, wrote works that unapologetically spoke in the common language of common folk and appealed as much to their sypahties as any other. Nelson is quick t...

Cloth, New

[SW: PAINE, THOMAS, 1737-1809 UNITED STATES_HISTORY_REVOLUTION,,]

Details

Paine, Thomas: Rights of Man, Wordsworth August 5, 1997 ISBN: 1853264679
Rights of Man is a classic statement of the belief in humanity's potential to change the world for the better. Published as a reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, it differs from that great work in every relevant respect. Where Burke uses the language of the governing classes, Paine writes with the vigour of a self-taught mast-maker and exciseman. With passionate and rapier wit, Paine challenges Burke's assertion that society cannot be judged by rational standards and found wanting. Rights of Man contains a fully-costed budget, advocating measures such as free education, old age pensions, welfare benefits and child allowance over 100 years before these things were introduced in Britain. It remains a compelling manifesto for social change.

Condition;Good ,Trade Paperback ,Social Philosophy 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches

[SW: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature]

Details

"Thomas Paine. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS PAINE, VOL. 5: THE RIGHTS OF MAN. NY: Vincent Parke (1908). 349p.
Odd volume from set. Contains Part II of THE RIGHTS OF MAN plus miscellaneous essays.

Hardcover, original cloth. Ex-seminary library book. Old paper label on spine, stamp on title page but otherwise a clean, tight copy in very good condition.

Details

PAINE, TOM; FAST, HOWARD. The Selected Work Of Tom Paine & Citizen Tom Paine. The Modern Library, New York: 1945.

640 pages. Includes Tom Paine's Common Sense, The Crisis Papers, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and his Letter to Washington, as well as Howard Fast's now classic biography of the man. Hardcover, no dustjacket. Reading copy.

[SW: (Key Words: American Revolution, Thomas Paine, Howard Fast, Tom Paime, Colonial America, George Washington, United States History, American Revolution, Common Sense, Human Rights, Federalists, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence).]

Details