It is impossible to talk about the debut of the first American-made mandolin without acknowledging the presence of a wildly popular group of Spanish musicians who arrived in America on New Year’s Day 1880. That collection of bandurria players and guitarists launched an on-the-road show and ignited mandolin mania without any of them ever having performed on a mandolin. La Estudiantina Española Fígaro (hereafter referred to as the Spanish Students) inaugurated a spectacular musical tour and in doing so, they inspired Italian immigrants, freshly arrived and armed with Neapolitan-made mandolins, to chart a comparable path. Thanks to these Italian mandolinists who paid homage to the Original Spanish Students a bandurria craze may have been avoided. In its place, Italian immigrant musicians sparked a revolution that infused an irrepressible enthusiasm for the...