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Herbert Eugene Bolton

Herbert Eugene Bolton (July 20, 1870 – January 30, 1953) was an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations,[1] and wrote or co-authored ninety-four works. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton disagreed with his mentor's Frontier theory and argued that the history of the Americas is best understood by taking a holistic view and trying to understand the ways that the different colonial and precolonial contexts have interacted to produce the modern United States. The height of his career was spent at the University of California, Berkeley where he served as chair of the history department for twenty-two years and is widely credited with making the renowned Bancroft Library the preeminent research center it is today.[2]

Herbert Eugene Bolton

(1870-07-20)20 July 1870

30 January 1953(1953-01-30) (aged 82)

Academic, author

Gertrude Janes
(m. 1895)

Guide to Materials for the History of the United States in the Principal Archives of Mexico
New Spain and the Anglo-American West

Bolton Theory[1]

Early life and education[edit]

Bolton was born on a farm between Wilton and Tomah, Monroe County, Wisconsin, in 1870 to Edwin Latham and Rosaline (Cady) Bolton. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a brother of Theta Delta Chi, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1895. That same year he married Gertrude Janes, with whom he eventually had seven children.


Bolton studied under Frederick Jackson Turner from 1896 to 1897. Starting in 1897, Bolton was a Harrison Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and studied American history under John Bach McMaster. In 1899, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and then taught at Milwaukee State Normal School until 1900.

President, American Historical Association 1932

Member, 1937[7]

American Philosophical Society

from the Handbook of Texas Online

Herbert Eugene Bolton

Thrapp, Dan L. "Bolton, Herbert Eugene" Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography. Vol. I, Glendale, Calif: A.H. Clark Co, 1988.

. Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man (University of Arizona Press, 1978)

Bannon, John Francis

Caughey, John W. "Herbert Eugene Bolton," in Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., Turner, Bolton, and Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier (1965)

Hanke, Lewis. Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory (1964)

Hurtado, Albert L. "Bolton and Turner: The Borderlands and American Exceptionalism." Western Historical Quarterly 44#1 (2013): 4–20.

online

Hurtado, Albert L. Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands (University of California Press; 2012) 360 pages

Wilson, Clyde N. Twentieth-Century American Historians (Gale: 1983, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 17) pp 74–78

The Great American History Hoax; How a few scholars fooled the world for 41-years

at Project Gutenberg

Works by Herbert Eugene Bolton

at Internet Archive

Works by or about Herbert Eugene Bolton

(1921)

The Spanish Borderlands

Finding aid to the Herbert Eugene Bolton Papers

at Find a Grave

Herbert Eugene Bolton

Texas State Historical Society