Common Sense and Other Writings or When Character Was King

Common Sense and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Author: Thomas Pain

Common Sense and Other Writings, by Thomas Paine, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars

Biographies of the authors

Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events

Footnotes and endnotes

Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work

Comments by other famous authors

Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations

Bibliographies for further reading

Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Though he did not emigrate from England to the American colonies until 1774, just a few months before the Revolutionary War began, Thomas Paine had an enormous impact on that war and the new nation that emerged from it. Common Sense, the instantly popular pamphlet he published in January 1776, argued that the goal of the struggle against theBritish should be not simply tax reform, as many were calling for, but complete independence. His rousing, radical voice was balanced by the equally independence-minded but more measured tones of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence later that year.

In later works, such as The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and other selections included in this volume, Paine proved himself a visionary moralist centuries ahead of his time. He believed that every human has the natural right to life's necessities and that government's role should be to provide for those in dire need. An impassioned opponent of all forms of slavery, he understood that no one in poverty is truly free, a lesson still to be learned by many of our leaders today.

Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, has followed the trajectory of American nation-building in her books Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Thomas Jefferson, and A Restless Past: History and the American Public.

Read also

When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan

Author: Peggy Noonan

No one has ever captured Ronald Reagan like Peggy Noonan. In When Character Was King, Noonan brings her own reflections on Reagan to bear as well as new stories - from Presidents George W. Bush and his father, George H. W. Bush, his Secret Service men and White House colleagues, his wife, his daughter Patti Davis, and his close friends - to reveal the true nature of a man even his opponents now view as a maker of big history. Marked by incisive wit and elegant prose, When Character Was King will both enlighten and move readers. It may well be the last word on Ronald Reagan, not only as a leader but as a man.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments	vii
"I Remember You"	1
All Presidents Come from Something	17
Movie Star	31
And Here He Becomes the Man He Was	54
"Honey, Roy Rogers Is Here"	79
The Ranch	103
Everything Changes	119
The Things They Carried	135
Executive Mansion	160
Grace Under Pressure	167
"Funny How History Works"	182
The Power of Truth	196
Tough Choices	215
Comedy	228
Rosty, Rush, Reagan	240
Strong Women	254
Big Trouble	263
Big Triumph	280
Dubya Was Watching	299
The Old Man of St. CloudRoad	311
SelectBibliography	329
Index	331