Author: Jett Conner

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.

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Politics During the War (1775-1783) Posted on

George Washington and Thomas Paine: Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

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 […]

by Jett Conner
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Law Posted on

Constitutions and the Rule of Law: Ten Voices from America’s Founding Period

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 […]

by Jett Conner
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Books and Publications Posted on

Thomas Paine on Popular Government in America: Evolution of a Radical’s Thinking

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 […]

by Jett Conner
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Critical Thinking Posted on

Presidential Power: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase

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. […]

by Jett Conner
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Features Posted on

Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

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 […]

by Jett Conner
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Features Posted on

Interview: Sarah Jane Marsh

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 […]

by Jett Conner
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Arts & Literature Posted on

A Brief Publication History of the “Times That Try Men’s Souls”

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 […]

by Jett Conner