Paine was born in England February 9, 1737. Paine Day needs to be celebrated as a national holiday everywhere to reflect the international impact of this forgotten founding father. His birthday should be widely celebrated as a day to recognize the international origins and impact of the American and French Revolutions. This year you can celebrate the event with the Thomas Paine Society in California. Take a look:
Celebrate Thomas Paine’s Birthday
at the
Headstrong Evening Club
Saturday, January 26, 2019
7:00 — 10:00 p.m.
Historic Castle Green
99 S. Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91105
Join Thomas Paine (Ian Ruskin), Thomas Jefferson (Dale Reynolds), and Surprise Guests from the past. Be prepared for an evening of rousing conversation, libations, food and fun as we recreate Thomas Paine’s favorite 18th Century English haunt, the White Hart Inn.
Topic for the Evening:
Who Writes History and How Much of it is True?
“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1984, while Winston Churchill said, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself,” then penned the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
If it is true that “history is written by the victors,” how much is true, what has been left out and how does it affect the world today? Join the conversation and speak your mind in this audience participation event like no other where we reveal a stunning possibility about Paine’s work left out of history.
Join the conversation and speak your mind in this audience participation event like no other.
Born in the United Kingdom, Paine was a revolutionary advocate of democracy in the American and French Revolutions. He fought with George Washington against the British in New York City, equal rights supported freedom for all African slaves, diplomacy with Native American tribes., and much more democracy in America than the constitution provides.
Later on, after barely escaping execution by guillotine during the Reign of Terror in France for seeking an end to the death penalty, he was outcast by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and his American allies after he criticized organized religion. This ostracizing went to the point where at his funeral outside New York City, only five people were present: “In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.”
At one time John Adams said, “without the pen of Thomas Paine, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain”. Also see our articles on the Founding Fathers.
Choose a Work to Read for Thomas Paine’s Birthday!
- Common Sense (1776)
- The American Crisis (1776-77)
- The Rights of Man (1791-92)
- Age of Reason (1794, 1795, 1807)
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