On the night of November 29, 1830, a group of Polish cadets burned a Warsaw brewery, stormed a palace, and lit a fire that would burn for nine months. The November Uprising ? the largest armed liberation struggle in partitioned Poland ? pitted an improvised constitutional state against the full military weight of the Russian Empire. The outcome was never in doubt by conventional military arithmetic. The story has never stopped mattering.

Drawing on the full sweep of the uprising's military, political, and cultural history, Casey Norgrove reconstructs the November Night in granular detail, traces the brilliant and fatal campaigns that followed, and introduces the extraordinary human figures who shaped the conflict: the pessimistic dictator who wouldn't fight the war he'd been appointed to lead; the engineer-general whose masterful battle plans were repeatedly betrayed by the commanders above him; and the countess who cut her hair, raised a partisan army in the Lithuanian forests, and died trying to reach Warsaw.

This is the story of a nation that chose to fight when the odds were overwhelming ? and of what that choice preserved long after the guns fell silent. Poland would not be free for another eighty-seven years. The November Uprising made sure it would eventually get there.