Thomas Paine published this pamphlet in January 1776, and American independence became imaginable. The arguments are simple, the prose direct, the anger unmistakable. Paine had been in America less than two years. He attacked not just British policy but the very idea of monarchy, and he did it in language that ordinary people could read and be persuaded by. Over 500,000 copies circulated in a population of two million. The pamphlet made a revolution possible by making it thinkable.