Translating a History Book about Rio Grande with Codex

In addition to Computer Science, my lifelong interests include history and Italy, often overlapping. When we watched Il Gattopardo on Netflix, made after a recent Italian classic, it rekindled my interest in Garibaldi. In the US, there are many towns named after Garibaldi, who captured the imagination of Americans and people of the world, upholding the ideas of liberty and independence. My oldest daughter learned to swim on a road trip in a hotel in Garibaldi, OR, a small town near Tillamook!

I bought a biography of Garibaldi by Alfonso Scirocco. It starts with the story of Garibaldi indicted in Nice and escaping to South America. He fought for the independence of Rio Grande, an ephemeral republic in the south of Brazil, also entangled with Uruguay and Argentina.

There are naval battles, sieges, and expeditions in the lagoons and famous rivers. The book's description of the wars is extremely confusing, so I wanted to read up more.

Alas, there are very few books about the Republic of Rio Grande, all of them in Portuguese, and most of them a hundred years old. Only one was downloadable as a PDF, HISTORIA DA REPUBLICA RIOGRANDENSE by Assis Brasil, from 1882. It was located by Codex in a public library, Câmara dos Deputados digital library, in Brazil online. A more recent book by Laytano was not available online; only library records. (1st edition: 1936, 2nd: 1983, he lived 1908-2000!) The only English books were by a PhD candidate, the English-language scholar André Jockyman Roithmann. His Oxford thesis is on the Rio Grandense Republic, he has published articles, including the 2024 Historical Journal piece “The Surprising Survival of Constitutionalism  the Caudillo Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1836–1845” and his book Republicanism and the State between Brazil and the River Plate: Rio Grande do Sul, 1808-1845 is listed as forthcoming with Oxford University Press, based on his thesis, "The Surprising Survival of Constitutionalism in the Caudillo Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1836–1845".

So we translated the Brasil's book into English together with ChatGPT 5.5 in Codex. At first, it downloaded an offline local model, but the quality was poor, with OCR artifacts interfering. Then we ran the text through the model itself, recreated the index, table of contents, and cover matter, and, after several passes, performed the final review with Extra High Intelligence.
It's amazing that after getting an idea to learn something, if a book exists about it in any language anywhere on Earth, accessible online, we can make a tailored book about it and read it in a few hours.

Read the History of the Rio Grande Republic by Assis Brasil (1882), translated by Alexy Khrabrov and Codex (2026).