The Death of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

In the spring of 1794, a slight, soft-spoken veteran of the American Revolution stood in the Market Square of Kraków and swore to save a nation that most of Europe had already written off. Twice partitioned, garrisoned by Russian troops and governed by an imperial envoy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seemed beyond rescue. Tadeusz Kościuszko believed otherwise, and he gambled everything on a radical idea: that the nation could survive only if it made room for everyone who would defend it.

This sweeping narrative history follows the Kościuszko Uprising from the engineer's apprenticeship at Saratoga and West Point to the charge of peasant scythemen at Racławice, the street fighting of Holy Week in Warsaw, the radical rising in Wilno, the Jewish cavalry regiment of Berek Joselewicz and the epic siege that forced the king of Prussia into retreat. It confronts the uprising's darkest hours, from the gallows of insurgent Warsaw to the catastrophe at Maciejowice and the massacre of Praga under Suvorov.

Defeated on the battlefield, the uprising nonetheless transformed a republic of nobles into a nation of citizens, one that would outlive its own erasure from the map for more than a century.