Submitted by David Champa, May 31, 2007 12:33

No single individual has had as large an impact upon European democratization as Giuseppe Garibaldi. His career, full of color and incident, made him appear to be an amalgam of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and the swashbucklers portrayed by the actor Errol Flynn. Yet the greatest hero of the nineteenth century, who rose to become a glorified, international symbol of patriotism that has no equivalent in the modern world, remains relatively obscure in the United States. Theodore Dwight in his 1859 translation of Garibaldi's memoirs posed the rhetorical question, "Who would not wish that Americans might be acquainted with the real characters of the Italian patriots." Lucy Riall's new historiography, appropriately released in the bicentennial of Garibaldi's birth, is an opportunity to fulfill that wish while simultaneously confirming A.J.P. Taylor's assertion that "Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history."

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