Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 222 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

The revolutionary generation was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history. The revolutionary leaders never intended to make a national revolution in any modern sense. They were patriots, to be sure, but they were not obsessed, as were later generations, with the unique character of America or with separating America from the course of Western civilization. As yet there was no sense that loyalty to one’s state or country was incompatible with cosmopolitanism…. The truth was, said Thomas Paine in Common Sense, that Americans are the most cosmopolitan people in the world…. Americans prided themselves on their hospitality and their treatment of strangers.