January 10 · This Day in America
A forty-seven-page pamphlet goes on sale in Philadelphia, signed only "by an Englishman." Its author is Thomas Paine, a failed corset-maker turned writer, in America barely a year. He does not argue cautiously, the way the colonial gentry do. He says the plain, unsayable thing: a continent does not belong to an island, and a king is no better than any other man. The prose is built for reading aloud — in taverns, around fires, to soldiers. It sells like nothing ever printed here, perhaps a copy for every five colonists alive. Within months, men who had wanted only their rights restored begin to want a country. Paine takes no royalties; he wants the argument free. By July, the thing he made unspeakable speakable is signed into history.
Source: www.gilderlehrman.org
Also on this day · 1941
With Britain alone against Germany and nearly broke, Franklin Roosevelt asks Congress for the power to lend and lease arms to nations whose defense he deems vital to America's. He had already framed it for the public: when a neighbor's house is on fire, you hand over your garden hose and argue about it later. The bill, numbered H.R. 1776, makes the United States the "arsenal of democracy" long before it fires a shot.
Source: www.archives.gov
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776