Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Lithuanian who changed the course of US history
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Monument to Tadeusz Kościuszko in Krakow / Vida Press
What do we know about the Lithuanian general – known as Thaddeus Kosciuszko in America, Tadeusz Kościuszko in Poland and Tadas Kosciuška in Lithuania – who changed the course of history in the United States?
The life story of Kościuszko was marked by love affairs as much as battlefield victories.
Kościuszko has the highest peak in Australia named after him and more than dozen of monuments in various US cities, but is relatively unknown at home.
“Several monographs dedicated to Kościuszko have been written in Poland, Ukraine and even Belarus, while our historians have not yet prepared such a synthesis,” says Juozas Skirius, a historian at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. “There have been some attempts, but so far without any tangible results.”