Although many gifted historians graced the stage of twentieth-century Peruvian letters, Jorge Basadre Grohmann (1903 – 1980) was clearly the dominant figure. Today Basadre is universally celebrated as the country’s most sagacious and representative historian, and he is commonly referred to as “our historian of the Republic.” Libraries, avenues, and colleges are named after him. The year 2003 was “The Year of Basadre” in Peru, with nearly every major cultural institution in Lima organizing an event in his honor. The National University of San Marcos published a handsome new edition of his first scholarly work, La iniciación de la República (1929 – 30) while the congress commissioned a new anthology of his more inspired essays under the title Memoria y destino del Perú.