This program is brought to the park in partnership with the American Philosophical Society and the David Center for the American Revolution. This is a hybrid event.  Visitors may attend in-person in the Visitor Center Auditorium or virtually on Zoom.  Registration is required. 

Log-in information provided with registration. Register Here

Sophia Rosenfeld, will be discussing her new book The Age of Choice:  A History of Freedom in Modern Life.

Thomas Paine was the first great American polemicist for the right to vote—or choice in the political sphere.  But it is not at all clear that what Paine and his contemporaries had in mind in the late eighteenth century was choice in the contemporary sense.  This talk will consider how the idea and experience of choice have evolved from the revolutionary moment to our present.

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History and Common Sense: A Political History, among other books. Her writing has also appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation.