"According to John Adams, 'Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.' With Common Sense, Thomas Paine energized colonial support for the armed rebellion that would make the American experiment a reality, using common sense to argue for colonial independence. Today, this cornerstone of the American Revolution has once again been rediscovered by ardent fans of the wildly popular and transformative...

"The purpose of America's Revolutionary Mind is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams called the real American Revolution--that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before what Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 'Concord Hymn' (1837), famously called the 'shot...