Happy Anniversary to Common Sense

Today, January 10th, is the 232nd anniversary of the 1776 publishing of Thomas Paine's Common Sense.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of Common Sense in convincing the general public of the American Colonies that they should be independent of Great Britain.

As noted in the wikipedia.org article linked above, between 150,000 and 600,000 copies of it were distributed. With a population in the colonies of maybe 2.5 million to 3 million, even if you take only the lower number, it's still something like 1 for every twenty people. At 600,000 copies, its one copy for every five people. To get an equivalent level of saturation today, you'd need to move beween 15 million and 60 million copies. (For reference purposes, imagine all the hoopla of a release of a Harry Potter book. The third Harry Potter book has sold about 60 million copies worldwide over the last eight years. ) Wow!

I think it is quite likely that without Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the course of the American Revolution may have been very different.