The use of the term “Pan AmericanPan American” as a unifying construct for the broad diversity which is Latin America was hardly original when it was appropriated in 1908 by the First Pan AmericanPan American Scientific CongressFirst Pan American Scientific Congress. On the contrary, the historic roots of the concept date as far back as the 1820s, when the term “Pan AmericanPan American” referred to an ephemeral, but nonetheless hoped-for, political consensus among American nations. While it is true that scientists in the eighteenth century had manifested a precocious unity in their support for enlightened political ideas, by the 1820s (i.e., after most of the Latin American nations had declared their independence from SpainSpain and Portugal), these scholars had been marginalized in the political discourse. As a result, most historians credit Simón BolívarBolívar, Simón, renowned as the “Liberator of South America,” with developing the broad outline of Pan Americanism as a political concept, rather than the scientific community.