Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern NationsViking, 2006 - 396 Seiten Despite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase “United States of America,” and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known – and the most controversial – of the American founding fathers. Unlike such friends and allies as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, the world’s first crusader for the public good has always remained a somewhat indistinct figure. How this lower- class British tradesman managed not only to have written the cornerstone of American democracy, Common Sense, but become a revered citizen of the world are questions that have challenged historians for centuries, and have more often than not left us with biographies that are more monumental than illuminating. In Craig Nelson’s Thomas Painewe now have a rich and vivid portrait that does justice to this towering figure of our history, one that brings him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the heady intellectual exhilaration of the Age of Enlightenment. Nelson traces Paine’s path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey to seek his fortune in the New World (in which he arrived on a stretcher, after a nearly deadly bout of shipboard typhus); from his early career as a crusading pamphleteer to his emergence as the heroic voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents; from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris during The Terror to his final years in America, where the once-lionized patriot spent his final days nearly impoverished and in the throes of dementia. Throughout his insightful portrait Nelson takes full account of this paradoxical figure, whom some contemporaries judged as brilliant and charismatic and others disparaged as abrasive and egotistical, a cherished patriot who was nonetheless dismissed by John Adams as a “disastrous meteor” and Teddy Roosevelt as a “dirty little atheist.” Five years in the making, drawing on both the most recent scholarship and the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Paris, London, Lewes, and Thetford, Thomas Painerestores this often misunderstood man to the stature that he deserves, and reveals him, a man who famously asserted that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” to be as much a man of our own time as a paragon of the Enlightenment. BACKCOVER: “Thomas Paine has had many biographers, but this is the first book to recover him in his own electrical style. Nelson's account brings Paine to life with all the flaws and foibles flaming away amidst the greatness. The story is poignant and the prose is incandescent.” |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-3 von 74
... wrote as a writer for hire was significantly different from what he would have written on his own , and the fact that he talked over his essays ahead of time with Morris was no different in technique from how he had written everything ...
... wrote Washington that " Mr. Jefferson said that , so far from having authorized it , he was exceedingly sorry to see it there ; not from a disavowal of the approbation which it gave the work , but because it had been sent to the printer ...
... wrote Jefferson on March 6 : my Mr. Paine wrote me a note desiring I would claim him as an Ameri- can , which I accordingly did , though contrary to my judgment , for reasons mentioned in last . The Minister's letter to me of the Ist ...
Inhalt
The Mission of Atonement I | 1 |
Begotten by a Wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf | 12 |
Pragmatic Utopians | 51 |
Urheberrecht | |
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Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations Craig Nelson Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2007 |
Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations Craig Nelson Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2007 |
Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations Craig Nelson Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2007 |