Virginian, Washington set the national standard for all citizens. "Over and over, Washington said that America must be something set apart. As he put it to Patrick Henry, 'In a word, I want an American character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves and not for others.'" As the historian Garry Wills has noted: "This was a theme dear to Washington. He wrote to Timothy Pickering that the nation 'must never forget that we are Americans; the remembrance of which will convince us we ought not to be French or English'." Washington's countrymen subsequently embraced his exhortation with notable enthusiasm. This semantic divergence among North American anglophones, however, remained largely unknown in the Spanish-American colonies. In 1801, the document titled Letter to American Spaniards—published in French (1799), in Spanish (1801), and in English (1808)—might have influenced Venezuela's Act of Independence and its 1811 constitution. The Latter-day Saints' Articles of Faith refer to the American continents as where they are to build Zion. Common short forms and abbreviations are the United States, the U.S., the U.S.A., and America; colloquial versions include the U.S. of A. and the States. The term Columbia (from the Columbus surname) was a popular name for the U.S. and for the entire geographic Americas; its usage is present today in the District of Columbia's name. Moreover, the womanly personification of Columbia appears in some official documents, including editions of the U.S. dollar. Usage at the United Nations Use of the term American for U.S. nationals is common at the United Nations, and financial markets in the United States are referred to as "American financial markets". American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States, is a recognized territorial name at the United Nations. Cultural views Spain and Hispanic America The use of American as a national demonym for U.S. nationals is challenged, primarily by Hispanic Americans. Spanish speakers in Spain and Latin America use the term to refer to people and things from the United States (from ), while refers to the continents as a whole. The term is also accepted in many parts of Latin America to refer to a person or something from the United States; however, this term may be ambiguous in certain parts. Up to and including the 1992 edition, the , published by the Real Academia Española, did not include the United States definition in the entry