ABSTRACT
Although he spent his first thirty-eight years in England, Thomas Paine (1737–1809) is most often associated with the American and French Revolutions. Paine moved to Pennsylvania in 1775, and in February of the following year he published a pamphlet, Common Sense, which urged the colonists to declare themselves independent of Britain. The beginning of Common Sense appears here as the first selection from Paine’s writings. He later moved to France, where he actively supported the French Revolution. The second selection is from The Rights of Man (1791, 1792), which Paine wrote to defend the revolution against Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (see selection 4.29 in this volume).
