Kościuszko: A Biography

Tadeusz Kościuszko was the rare figure who earned his place in two nations' hearts. A Polish-Lithuanian nobleman who crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside Washington, he returned to Europe to lead his own people's revolution against the empires that had partitioned his homeland. Monica M. Gardner's 1920 biography traces this extraordinary arc: from his birth in 1746 in the Lithuanian borderlands, through his engineering training at the Warsaw Corps of Cadets, to his brilliant fortifications at West Point and his doomed but glorious 1794 uprising against Russian and Prussian occupation. Gardner reveals a man shaped as much by Enlightenment ideals of civic virtue and natural rights as by military discipline. She captures the anguish of watching his beloved Poland disappear from the map of Europe, and the fierce moral conviction that drove him to risk everything for democracy when monarchies surrounded him. This is both a portrait of a remarkable individual and a window into the turbulent era when modern nations were being born in blood and argument.