Thomas Paine was arguably the single most influential political writer in the English-speaking world during the great upheavals of the American and French Revolutions. His writings here reappear in the acclaimed Cambridge Texts series. For this revised and updated edition the distinguished intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick brings together an expanded collection of the classic Paine texts - Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason - as well as the first of Paine’s papers on The Crisis of 1776. A brief chronology, updated notes for further reading, and a succinct and lucid introduction to the principal themes of each text offer further support to the student reader. This selection will appeal to students in a variety of disciplines from political theory to American history, and enable further generations to engage at first hand with one of the most gifted and popular expositors of radical ideas ever to generate mass support.