In 1819 an English journalist dug up Thomas Paine's grave on a New York farm and shipped the bones to England for a heroic reburial that never happened; the remains were eventually lost. Ten years earlier, only six people had attended the funeral of the most widely read political writer of the 18th century. This episode asks how the man whose pamphlet launched a revolution ended up ostracized by the nation he helped create.

We follow Paine from a corset-maker's apprenticeship in Thetford through privateering, two firings as an excise officer, and near-debtor's prison, to Benjamin Franklin's letter, the 1776 pamphlet that went viral in taverns and farms, and the morale-boosting essays Washington had read to freezing troops. Then come the Silas Deane affair, his million-copy defense of the French Revolution and the British sedition warrant, n ...