Curio Cabinet

In the face of tyranny, sometimes it pays to be a Paine in the neck. British-American political writer and propagandist Thomas Paine was born on this day in 1737. Paine is known for being one of the most influential voices during the American Revolution, but he was also a strong supporter of the French Revolution.
 
Paine was born in Norfolk, England, to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, and had limited access to education in his early life. While his abilities to read, write, and perform basic arithmetic allowed him to work several jobs, he had few opportunities for economic advancement. Paine also seemed to struggle with every trade he attempted. One of his earliest jobs was being an officer of the excise, which involved chasing smugglers to collect excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol. The job paid little, and Paine was dismissed from the position after he published a pamphlet arguing that higher pay for excise officers would lead to lower corruption. Paine’s fortunes changed in 1774, when he had a chance meeting with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin urged Paine to move to America, and he arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 30, 1774. There, he cut his teeth working at the Pennsylvania Magazine, owned by Franklin’s son-in-law, Robert Aitkin. During his tenure working with Aitkin, Paine published a number of articles under his own name and under pseudonyms. Being a steadfast abolitionist, Paine published African Slavery in America, an article that criticized and condemned the African slave trade.
 
Paine really began to make a name for himself when anti-British sentiment began to grow in the American colonies, along with calls for independence. In January, 1776, Paine anonymously published his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, largely aimed at American colonists who were still undecided on the matter of independence. More than calling for sympathy, the pamphlet encouraged colonists to revolt against the British and to sever ties with the empire completely. Paine’s limited educational background might have actually contributed to his success. While his arguments were coherent and compelling, they appealed to a wider audience because of his tendency to speak and write in a plain, straightforward manner, forgoing the use of latin terms and phrases or philosophical allusions popular with more educated writers of the time. Upon being published, Common Sense sold 500,000 copies in a matter of months, and it was popular to read it aloud during public gatherings. Another popular pamphlet by Paine, The American Crisis, was published the same year, and it was promoted amongst American officers by George Washington himself. This pamphlet was aimed at bolstering the morale of the colonists as conflicts began to escalate in the American Revolution. It contained the now famous words, “These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
 
Despite his staunch support for the American Revolution, Paine had few friends left by the end of it. When he returned to Britain in 1787 and wrote The Rights of Man in favor of the French Revolution, he was tried for treason, forcing him to flee to France, where he was imprisoned, ironically, for opposing the execution of King Louis XVI. Paine was released thanks to the American ambassador to France, but he later openly criticized George Washington for failing to support him when he had claimed American citizenship to avoid prison. He eventually returned to the former American colonies, now called the United States of America, at the invitation of President Thomas Jefferson. Paine died in 1809, and only six mourners attended his funeral. For much of the following century, Paine was remembered as an instigator and poorly regarded. Today, though, he’s remembered as a leading thinker and writer who helped embolden everyday Americans. No Paine, no American Revolution!

 
[Image description: A painting of Thomas Paine wearing a black suit and white neckcloth sitting in a green chair.] Credit & copyright: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Laurent Dabos, 1761 - 1835. Public Domain, CC0.

Who said court documents had to be boring? Researchers recently translated writings on a 1,900-year-old piece of papyrus, and it has proven to be one of the oldest true crime documents in existence. The papyrus was originally found in the Judean Desert along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was recently rediscovered by researchers in a storeroom, after going overlooked for quite some time. It was originally marked as being written in Nabataean, an ancient Aramaic language, but when sifting through the piles of papyrus, researcher Hannah Cotton immediately recognized the labeling as erroneous. Indeed, the papyrus actually contained 133 lines of ancient Greek text, used by Romans to document court cases. One of the researchers said in a statement from the university, “This is the best-documented Roman court case from Judaea, apart from the trial of Jesus.” However, the document isn’t anything as grandiose as a religious text or a murder trial. Instead, it describes a Roman court case against Gadalias and Saulos, two would-be tax dodgers who allegedly tried to circumvent Roman laws. The case took place around 130 C.E., after the two forged documentation regarding the buying and selling of slaves. Tax laws aren’t fun regardless of what century you live in, but in ancient Rome, they could be a matter of life or death. The Roman Empire punished tax cheats with years of hard labor and even executed them on occasion. Interestingly, the papyrus was written by the prosecuting lawyer in the case, and the detailed document is giving historians insight into what legal proceedings looked like in ancient Rome and Roman-occupied territories. Unfortunately, much of the document is incomplete since portions of the papyrus were degraded over time. This case seems to have gone from solved to unsolved. If only true-crime podcasters had existed in ancient Rome.

Throughout the centuries, history reminds us of a sobering fact: prejudice can make ordinary people do terrible things. Last week was the 80-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But even before that particular concentration camp was built, the Nazi regime carried out a series of escalating, violent attacks against minorities in Germany and other occupied territories, often with the help of ordinary citizens. These attacks were spurred on by violent Nazi rhetoric, and were meant to terrorize Jewish people, LGBTQ people, political dissidents, and anyone else that the regime considered an “enemy.” Perhaps the most infamous of these attacks came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
 
On November 7, 1938, 17-year-old Polish-German Jew Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, France. Grynszpan’s attack on the previously-obscure diplomat was motivated by the deportation of Polish Jews into “relocation camps” just weeks prior. Grynszpan’s family were among those taken to the camps. Vom Rath died a few days after he was shot, on November 9, when a Nazi gathering in Munich happened to be celebrating the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s 1923 failed coup attempt. Chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels seized the opportunity to rile up outrage, using the news of Vom Rath’s death as a rallying cry for Nazi supporters. Goebbels called for violent action against the Jewish population of Germany and Austria, and Nazi officials spread the orders across their territories. Over the course of two nights, countless homes and businesses owned by Jewish families were vandalized or destroyed, leaving the streets littered with shards of broken glass and rubble. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald, while around 100 Jews were murdered in the outbreak of violence. When news of the events reached the U.S., President Franklin D. Roosevelt condemned the violence and cut diplomatic ties with Germany, though the move wasn’t widely supported, as many in the U.S. favored a policy of appeasement. Kristallnacht was one of the Nazi Party’s first major steps toward the planned eradication of Jews and other minorities in Europe, and further legislative measures restricting their rights were passed in the following days and months. For the Nazis, propaganda was just another weapon to be put to violent use.