| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Harvey J. Kaye. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. New York: Hill and Wang. 2005. Pp. 326. $25.00.

Edward Larkin. Thomas Paine and the Literature on Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 205. $65.00.

Thomas Paine has, by and large, been at least somewhat better served by historians than by his contemporaries. Nearly guillotined in France for supporting exile rather than death for Louis XVI, excoriated on his return to the United States for his deist religious opinions, he nonetheless enjoys the near-unique status of having been a central figure in both the American and French Revolutions, and of plebeian origins to boot. The existing secondary literature on Paine is now mostly dated, though there is a relatively recent larger biography (John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life [1995]) and one somewhat shorter (Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom [1994]), to which should be added Fruchtman's study of Paine's religious ideas, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (1993). Yet Paine has often been under fire from conservatives for supporting parliamentary reform in Britain and revolution in France, and rarely gets anything like a balanced handling in such treatments. Nearly a century after Moncure Daniel Conway's four-volume edition of Paine's writings, and more than half a century since Philip Foner's edition thereof, there remains no remotely satisfactory scholarly edition of his work. One can but hope that the upcoming bicentenary of his death will instill sufficient enthusiasm to rectify this.

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