Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini have become little more than footnotes in the history of popular politics in the anglophone world after 1850. Among the general public today their names are all but forgotten. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Garibaldi and Mazzini enjoyed international fame for their deeds and their ideas and they inspired generations of activists determined to change the world. With special reference to Australia, this paper will attempt to restore Garibaldi and Mazzini to their proper place in the history of anglophone politics in the long nineteenth century and, at the same time, consider the reasons why they lost it.

Professor Paul Pickering is Deputy Director at the Research School of Humanities & the Arts Head of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Group.  Paul is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.  His most recent books are a biography of an Anglo-Irish political leader, Feargus O’Connor: A Political Life (London, 2008) and Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (London, 2010) (edited with Iain McCalman). His articles have been published by leading journals, both in Australian and overseas, including Past and Present, History, Labour History, Albion, Australian Historical Studies, History Australia, Australian Journal of Politics and History, and the English Historical Review. He has also contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of Labour Biography and numerous books including Elections: Full Free and Fair (Sydney, 2002), Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge, 2002), Papers for the People (London, 2005); Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005) and Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism in Europe (St Lucia, 2008).