In the summer of 2016, my family flew ahead of me to England for a vacation. Their taxi driver from the airport to London was chatty, and somehow the conversation drifted to the fact that he was from Lewes, in Sussex. This led to a bit of trivia about his hometown that the driver thought would be of interest to visitors from America: Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned American whose Common Sense would become the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18th century—and tilt America toward