Common sense paine6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”Ĭenturies before the existence of the internet, Common Sense managed to go viral, selling an estimated 500,000 copies. “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Paine wrote. ![]() But its author also made an equally eloquent argument that Americans had a unique opportunity to change the course of history by creating a new sort of government in which people were free and had the power to rule themselves. Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine and first published in Philadelphia in January 1776, was in part a scathing polemic against the injustice of rule by a king. Even after armed hostilities broke out between the American colonists and British forces in 1775, many prominent colonists seemed reluctant to consider the idea of actually breaking away from Britain, and instead insisted that they were still its loyal subjects, even as they resisted what they saw as its tyrannical laws and unfair taxation.īut a single 47-page pamphlet-the 18th-century equivalent of a paperback book-did a lot to quickly change that, and shift American sentiment toward independence. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |