Jett Conner, PhD, is a retired political science professor, college administrator and academic policy officer for the Colorado Department of Higher Education. He studied the political thought of the American founding period during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship at Princeton University, and recently published John Adams vs Thomas Paine: Rival Plans for the Early Republic (Westholme, 2018). He’s enjoying retirement in Denver while pursuing numerous interests including travel, wildlife watching and reading and writing about the history and political thought of the American Revolution.
One day in the late winter of 1788 in Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette and two other champions of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, held a little “convention of our own,” according to Lafayette. They were discussing the latest news from America about the debates taking place over ratifying the Constitution of 1787.[1] Jefferson […]
George Washington was famously taciturn, often a man of few words in public gatherings. And though his published works are sparse in comparison to many of his fellow founders, he nevertheless left a voluminous written record of correspondence and diary entries that is still being parsed today.[1] It was while commanding the Continental Army that […]
The idea that no one is above the law is a long-held and repeated precept of American constitutionalism. Its roots go back to the philosophical and historical foundations of western political thought. Holding a prominent place in this history is the thirteenth-century English Magna Carta. Although it does not explicitly use the phrase, the document—a […]
It would be hard to find a more strident, vocal supporter of popular government during America’s founding period than Thomas Paine. The proposals put forth in his January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense for an “unmixed” and unchecked democratic scheme for America, designed to replace the British arrangement of balanced and mixed powers of King, Lords […]
George Washington slept here. After the commander in chief was summoned to Princeton, New Jersey during the summer of 1783, and finding no rooms for rent, certainly not anything sizeable enough to serve his needs, Washington, his wife Martha, their servants and enslaved persons, and a small company of soldiers managed to find a place […]
The Routledge Guide to Paine’s Rights of Man by Frances A. Chiu (London & New York: Routledge, 2020) The American Revolution, John Adams famously wrote in 1818, was begun in the “minds and hearts of the people” before the American Revolutionary War began.[1] It was a suggestion that the Revolution was unique and the result of […]
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from Marguerite Brazier Bonneville, a French emigre and Thomas Paine’s former caretaker. Bonneville asked the former president if she could publish Paine and Jefferson’s correspondence. Paine had left most of his estate including all of his personal papers to her in his will when he died in 1809. […]
The Rise of Thomas Paine and the Case of the Officers of Excise by Paul Myles (Lewes: The Thomas Paine Society UK, 2018) When John Adams noticed in the American Crisis II, which first appeared in January 1777, Thomas Paine’s comment that he had never published “a syllable in England in my life,” the declaration might have raised […]
Coming up rapidly from behind the British privateer, the frigate suddenly lowered one national flag and raised another, the customary ruse of switching colors, swung about and unleashed a fury of cannon fire directly at the stern of the enemy ship. Although it had done its best to prepare for just such an attack, the […]
Book Review: Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution by J.C.D. Clark (Oxford University Press, 2018, 485 pages) BUY THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON British historian J.C.D Clark sets out in his newly published book on Thomas Paine to reevaluate Paine and his contributions to the “age of revolution” by examining […]
Today, May 29, 2018, Disney Hyperion is introducing young readers to the American Revolution with Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word, an eighty-page picture book biography written by Sarah Jane Marsh[1] and illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham. The story focuses on Paine’s resilient early life and his call for independence through his famous pamphlet Common Sense. I […]
Thomas Paine’s sensational pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in January of 1776, has a singular place of importance in the literature of the American Revolutionary era. So famous was the title that Paine would adopt it as a sobriquet when authoring future works. The publication history of that wildly successful pamphlet is well established.[1] But […]
There is a tendency today to lump the Founding Fathers together as though somehow they thought alike, acted in unison and actually got along with each other while leading the Revolutionary Cause and founding a new nation. Now that America’s founding is well over two hundred years old, distance brings clarity in understanding the period, […]
Does saying so make it so? Perhaps, if said convincingly and repeatedly. But sometimes it’s fair to ask: Who says so? And how do they know? It is said that George Washington ordered the first number of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis series to be read to his ragged troops before boarding boats to cross […]
