Truth Seeker magazine cover honouring Thomas Paine, January 1898

What it is

This is the front page of The Truth Seeker, a New York journal of freethought and reform, dated Saturday, 29 January 1898 (Vol. 25 No. 5). The cover shows a photograph of a stone monument inscribed with Paine's name, a man standing beside it, and wreaths at its base. Below are columns of epitaph verse and an essay by R. G. Ingersoll, with quotations from Paine in the margins. The cover was printed as a tribute, more than a century after Paine's death in 1809, and it is held on Wikimedia Commons.

Why it matters

Paine's reputation was contested for much of the nineteenth century. Freethought papers such as The Truth Seeker kept his memory alive by praising his support for the American Revolution and his religious criticism. Ingersoll, a well-known orator, is named in the cover as a contributor, which shows how these circles connected writers across generations.

Look closer

• What does the choice of a monument photograph, rather than a portrait, suggest about how the paper wanted readers to remember Paine?
• Why might a newspaper in 1898 pair Paine's words with verse and an essay by a living orator?
• Whose voices are missing from this tribute, and what might a critic of Paine have written instead?