From an American perspective, the ‘Gayangos phenomenon’ was the result of the intersection of four historical processes. The first was the arrival of a distinctive generation of so-called ‘Romantic historians’, whose goal was to adumbrate the roots of American history. That their leading lights – Washington Irving, George Ticknor, and William Hickling Prescott – were Hispanists was a contingency founded in a Romantic vision that cast ‘American’ history in a hemispheric light, whose touchstone was, of course, Columbus and his recasting as a kind of ‘founding father’ of the new republic. Here, Washington Irving's biography of Columbus was the key document; for all its deficiencies it was viewed with great respect in the United States of the nineteenth century. Other historians of this distinctive generation – Jared Sparks, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman – were the founders of the history of the United States. The second phenomenon is a corollary of the first: in order to write serious history, there had to be adequate libraries, and the new republic had none. The first great collections – those of Harvard College Library, the Boston Athenaeum and, in New York, of the Astor Library, antecedent of the New York Public Library – were built in this period. The thirst for books pertaining to the birth of the nation set off a movement of European books and manuscripts across the Atlantic, which must rank as one of the premier cultural milestones of modernity.