William Hickling Prescott won critical acclaim, popular success, and enduring influence as the first scholarly United States historian of Spain and Spanish America. A Boston Brahmin who made letters his career, he belonged to the community of Harvard-educated, Unitarian historians that also included Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, and George Ticknor. Prescott combined intensive research with compelling literary narrative in the Romantic vein. His best-selling, much-reprinted histories of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish monarchies and conquests in Latin America added color to a history that had previously been told more dryly; he also gave scholarly depth to episodes that had been the province of romantic fiction. Prescott's historical interpretations sprang from his own milieu and have exerted continuing influence on the popular imagination and on historical scholarship. In particular, his History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of...