Joseph Rezek on "Common Sense" (Part of The Revolution Is News)

“In America the law is king.” So wrote Thomas Paine in his extraordinary, bestselling 1776 pamphlet Common Sense. Paine claimed that Americans bought hundreds of thousands of copies but that, as Professor Joseph Rezek noted, was a bit of puffery. Still, whether it was sold in the tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, even George Washington wrote that he knew it was “working a powerful change… in the Minds of many Men.”

Rezek inaugurated a series of events focused on aspects of the American Revolution, a resource created as part of our initiative The Revolution is News. He talked about Paine’s literary strategies as well as the political content and print history of his publications. And he shared some information about specific copies of Common Sense, including in the JCB’s collections.

The JCB has a wonderful collection of first and early editions of Common Sense, many of which are digitized. One remarkable copy is in our current exhibit, 1776 Across the Americas, and was owned by Nicholas Brown– who identified the author as “a scoffer of religion!” He was right about Paine, but surely added that note only decades later after Paine published his Age of Reason (which is also in our collection, of course).

If you missed our conversation on March 31, 2026, you can watch the recording on YouTube! (Click on the image below.)