The Clements Library’s digitization efforts help make our collections available for research anywhere you have an internet connection. If you’re looking to honor Black History Month with a deep dive into the archives that reflect this rich past, let us draw your attention to several online options.
Welcome to “A Day in the Life at The Clements Library!” On the second edition of this series, we meet with Emma Schneider, an Information Resources Assistant.
The Manuscripts Division has made a dozen collections available for research this past month, including a pocket diary kept during Cornelius D. Bowers’ service in the 84th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment and a manuscript journal penned by a currently unidentified supercargo while aboard two smuggling expeditions between August 1808 and March 1809.
The Clements Library Digitization Team invites you to discover additional snapshots of history in this new selection of eighteenth century manuscripts, now accessible online through our Digitized Archival Collections.
Paine’s revolutionary temperament was not restricted to matters of politics. His 1794 book The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology extended his critique to theology and religion, questioning key tenets of the Christian faith, criticizing the institutional dimensions of religion more generally, and espousing Deism as the only faith compatible with human reason.
Fifteen years after the publication of Common Sense, Paine published the first part of his Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution. Rights of Man celebrated the French Revolution as heralding a new dawn of liberty and reason, and critiqued Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, which had criticized the French revolutionaries, defended traditional, established political norms and institutions, and endorsed gradual reform over wholescale political change.
This page offers a snapshot of the reactions and responses to Common Sense, and Paine more generally, that make clear how much controversy he and his work aroused. Both visually and textually, Paine was lionized and vilified as he became an icon synonymous with the ideas he advocated for.
