As Henry noted, the term certainly does appear in Wheatley's poem to Washington in 1775, but we have not been able to determine whether she coined it or not; Wheatley was quite well-read and may have picked it up somewhere. A 1756 French work of poetry by Marie Anne Le Page Fiquet Du Boccage is entitled _La Colombiade, ou, La foi portee au Nouveau Monde_ and may have been in circulation. Clearly the term was in the public consciousness by the end of the Revolutionary War, when the trustees of King's College in NYC reopened the school as Columbia University. One book that may shed some light -- but which alas is not in our library at this time -- is _The American Columbiad: Discovering America, Inventing the United States_, edited by Mario Materassi, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, and Clara Bartocci, et al., Amsterdam, 1996. -- Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Associate Editor Papers of George Washington University of Virginia [log in to unmask] http://www.virginia.edu/gwpapers HEY, MY BOOK IS OUT! _George Washington: A Biographical Companion_ published by ABC-CLIO in May 2002. See my website: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~feg3e/GWBio/ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html