As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1776, Village Preservation’s “Revolutionary Village” initiative asks us to consider revolution not as a single historical moment, but as an ongoing process rooted in ideas, dissent, and the persistent reimagining of democracy. Few figures embody that tradition more powerfully than Thomas Paine, born […]
On December 19, 1776, Thomas Paine published The American Crisis, a series of pamphlets that helped fan the flames of American patriotism to inspire the American troops and public during the long, arduous years of the Revolutionary War. In a previous blog post, we discussed Paine, his legacy, and how he spent his final years […]
“These are the times that try men’s souls…” so says the opening line of the first pamphlet of the series, The American Crisis, written by Thomas Paine, which was published on December 19, 1776, in the Pennsylvania Journal. Paine, an eighteenth-century philosopher and author of the Enlightenment, was known as the ‘Father of the American Revolution,’ in large […]
