- Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, controversialist and international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was a central text behind the call for American independence from Britain; his Rights of Man (1791–2) was the most widely read pamphlet in the movement for reform in Britain in the 1790s and for the opening decades of the nineteenth century; he was active in the French Revolution and was a member of the French National Convention between 1792 and 1795; he is seen by many as a key figure in the emergence of claims for the state’s responsibilities for welfare and educational provision, and his Age of Reason provided a popular deist text that remained influential throughout the 19th century. In his own lifetime, and subsequently, he has been extensively vilified and often dismissed. Yet many of his ideas still command wide interest and enthusiasm in readers throughout the world.
- An Unbroken Historical Record: Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve (nps.gov)
Whidbey Island is in an area that once lay under 3,000 feet of ice. Thirteen thousand years ago, receding glaciers gouged out the waterways and shaped the features of Puget Sound. Glacial moraine formed Whidbey Island, and like most Puget Sound landforms, it ranges no higher than 500 feet in elevation. The island varies from one to ten miles in width and its length extends nearly 40 miles in a north-south direction. Whidbey is the largest island in the Sound; in fact, after New York’s Long Island was officially declared a peninsula in 1985, Whidbey Island could claim to be the longest and largest island in the lower 48 states.
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy of