In the early weeks  of 1776, Independence favor was fanned by the publication of the most influential and best selling book ever published in America. Thomas Paine had  arrived in the Colonies about a year earlier with a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin and immediately and set out to continue his legacy of failure at everything he tried.

Until he took the ideas of the enlightenment and put pen to pap and produced a book that soon had every person in the colonies discussing a single idea: Independence.

That fever led  villages, towns, counties all over the colonies declaring their Independence  from the King. And it led the Continental congress to act, and on July 4, 1776, they would issue the Declaration that was - and still is - heard around the  world. They founded a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated tot he  proposition that all men are created equal... an idea to which the men who wrote  those words knew they weren't living.

But they also  believed in the future, Americans would find a way to preserve and expand those  ideas...