Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Tom Paine’s Revolutions

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Tom Paine’s Revolutions,” on a writer whose words inspired struggles for independence and ultimately left him alone, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of the new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/northern-virginia-thomas-paine .]

When Thomas Paine died in June 1809, scarcely a dozen people showed up to bury him.

His funeral took place on the 250-acre farm in Westchester County that the people of New York had given him in gratitude for his role in inspiring the American Revolution. The grave was neither remote nor difficult to reach. Yet not one political leader came to pay respects to a man whose words had once helped set a continent on fire.

How did one of the American Revolution’s greatest celebrities end up dying virtually friendless and despised?

Join Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland, for a dramatic look at the astonishing rise and spectacular fall of Thomas Paine, the impoverished English immigrant and former corset-maker who became one of the most electrifying political writers of his age.

You’ll learn how Paine arrived in America with little money or status and, through sheer force of argument, found a language capable of turning revolutionary ideas into calls to action. Bell will explore the extraordinary success of Common Sense, the incendiary 46-page pamphlet that appeared in 1776, sold on a staggering scale, and helped persuade ordinary colonists that independence from Britain was not only possible but necessary.

Then he’ll trace what happened when Paine kept pushing.
Paine’s Rights of Man, published beginning in 1791, embraced the radical promise of the French Revolution and attacked inherited privilege and monarchy. His Age of Reason, first published in 1794, challenged organized religion while championing deism, reason, and free thought. The convictions that had once made Paine a revolutionary hero increasingly made him seem dangerous, offensive, and intolerable to the cautious new republic that had emerged from the revolution he helped ignite.

Come learn how America’s most relatable revolutionary became one of its most notorious outcasts—and how a founding father once celebrated for saying what others would not ended up paying a devastating price for refusing to stop. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A statue of Thomas Paine in Thetford, England (Photo by Richard Croft / Wikimedia Commons.)