Many Americans labor under the misconception that the nation’s colonial and national heritage was almost wholly accomplished by an English migration, and the notion of early American diversity ends at an acknowledgment of the slave trade conducted between Southern buyers, Northern shippers, the African continent and the Caribbean region. However, early America witnessed the development of New York by the Dutch, the southernmost regions by Spain, and what would become eastern Canada by the French after lengthy battles with Britain. In fact, the Seven Years’ War during the 1750s was fought on a nearly global scale between several European belligerents.

As a result, when the Revolution began, the Continental Army sported numerous volunteers from Ireland, Scotland, virtually every European nation between France and Russia, and men from the northern and southern borders of the European continent.

Poland’s famous soldier, artist, engineer, and statesman Tadeusz Kościuszko possessed a uniquely expanded vision that perceived the American conflict as the test of a new universal paradigm. A philosophical revolution in itself, the vision held by Locke and Jefferson for a previously unknown standard of individual liberty found an obsessive place in Kościuszko’s life view. His response to its power was to make him a much-heralded citizen of both continents in perpetuity, in war and peacetime. A hero in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, Kościuszko not only fought as an officer in the Continental Army of General Washington, but also designed and constructed the defenses for some of America’s earliest cities and important military defenses. As a friend to the fledgling state, he went on to lead a “national insurrection” in his Polish homeland against centuries-old Russian domination, mirroring the American effort. Denying allegiance and assistance to Tsars and Emperors such as Catherine and Napoleon unless Polish independence was guaranteed, Kościuszko witnessed the disappearance of Poland from the world map, an absence not rectified for well over a century.

Today, streets, bridges, monuments, and even neighborhoods bear Kościuszko’s name across the country, and in Polish communities, he is often hailed as a hero equal to General Washington himself. Tadeusz Kościuszko: The Life and Legacy of Poland’s Most Famous General profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most important figures.