Status Updates From Our Lost Declaration: Ameri...

Most of us know about Thomas Paine and his pamphlet _Common Sense_ -- but how many of us know that he donated all the proceeds from it to the Continental Army? Or that he joined it and became America's first war correspondent, sending off dispatches from the fighting front?

The Townshend Act and the furor of the colonists, who felt they were being unjustly imposed upon. How they're still thinking in terms of the rights of an Englishman, and that they should be the same on either side of the Atlantic. That they didn't leave those rights behind when they settled the New World -- and the Crown makes things worse by punishing them, shutting down their courts and harassing them.