skopia
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.
Paine tells the colonists that an island cannot rule a continent and that hereditary kingship is an absurdity. Read aloud in taverns, it turned grievance into independence within months.