Thomas Paine was an important leader in the fight for independence from England. His pamphlet Common Sense stirred the populace to join the fight.

Thomas Paine was a prominent English-American philosopher and political activist. Paine was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and his influential pamphlets helped inspire the American Revolution. Paine's classics such as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, are still widely read today. This is a pamphlet, published in 1782, that Paine wrote in response to what he felt was an erroneous account of the American Revolution.