Word: pamphlets
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Aside from its political origins, the pinlosophical roots of the Declaration are deep and varied. Even though Jefferson says, "I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it," the document reflects such classical ideas as Aristotle's perception of an unchangeable natural law pertaining to all men, and the Stoics' even more explicit assertion of a natural law knowable by men and thus capable of directing them, as rational and social animals, toward perfection. Such ideas took Christian form in the minds of teachers like St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepted from classical writers the concept that there...
...British government. Radicals were also incensed at a new abridgment of civil liberties. New Englanders were fearful of the apparent revival of a powerful Catholic neighbor to the north. (A 19-year-old student at King's College in New York, Alexander Hamilton, even wrote a pamphlet suggesting that the Inquisition would be reborn and might soon be burning heretics at the stake in America...
...inhabit the earth. The Kentish Gazette daringly writes of the "corrupt influence of the Crown"-the King is traditionally immune from such criticism-and says that "our brave American fellow-subjects are not yet corrupted, but gloriously stand up in defense of their undoubted rights and liberties." In a pamphlet that has sold 60,000 copies, an almost unheard-of number, Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, bluntly argues the Colonists' case: "What have they done? Have they crossed the ocean and invaded us? ... On the contrary. This is what we have done to them...
...press freedom, was summoned before the New Hampshire House of Representatives to answer for an article in his Gazette attacking independence; his paper has not appeared since. New York Packet Publisher Samuel Loudon reports that he was warned recently by the local Committee of Safety not to distribute a pamphlet he had printed for a client who wanted to answer Paine's Common Sense "lest my personal safety be endangered." That night a group of men forced their way into his office, seized all 1,500 pamphlets and burned them on the Common. "The freedom of the press...
...months ago, perhaps nine out of ten Americans opposed independence and favored reconciliation with England. Now that independence is a proclaimed fact, the astounding change in public opinion may be attributed largely to an anonymous 47-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense. "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth," the author cried out in support of independence; nor indeed has the sun ever shined on a political pamphlet so widely read. Originally published in Philadelphia last January, it has been reprinted, pirated and repirated. Perhaps as many as 100,000 copies have been bought and passed from hand...