Available From UC Press

This definitive biography offers a new critical assessment of the life, works, and ideas of Herbert E. Bolton (1870–1953), a leading historian of the American West, Mexico, and Latin America. Bolton, a famous pupil of Frederick Jackson Turner, formulated a concept—the borderlands—that is a foundation of historical studies today. His research took him not only to the archives and libraries of Mexico but out on the trails blazed by Spanish soldiers and missionaries during the colonial era. Bolton helped establish the reputation of the University of California and the Bancroft Library in the eyes of the world and was influential among historians during his lifetime, but interest in his ideas waned after his death. Now, more than a century after Bolton began to investigate the Mexican archives, Albert L. Hurtado explores his life against the backdrop of the cultural and political controversies of his day.

Albert L. Hurtado is Travis Chair in Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the editor of Major Problems in American Indian History, second edition, and author of Indian Survival on the California Frontier, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California, and John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier, winner of the Caughey Prize from the west Western Historical Association.

“A vivid, compelling, and timely biography of an historian who struggled, sometimes against his own prejudices, to make both the United States and American history less provincial. Al Hurtado has managed to capture more than half a century of American intellectual life, social life, and institution building through the story of single man.”—Richard White, author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

“This definitive biography does double duty as a candid chronicle of academic history on the Pacific Slope, with all the rivalries, shifting allegiances, and promotional disputes that swirled around the persistent productivity of Herbert Eugene Bolton, academic archon of the Spanish Borderlands.”—Kevin Starr, University of Southern California

“Al Hurtado fills a void with this comprehensive biography of Herbert Eugene Bolton, the historian who invented the concept of ‘the Spanish Borderlands’ of North America and imagined a hemispheric history of a ‘Greater America’ that transcended national boundaries. Here he is, warts and all, amidst all the messy and fascinating details of his professional life. Deeply researched and written with verve and irony, this is a marvelous read.”—John Mack Faragher, author (with Robert V. Hine) of The American West: A New Interpretive History.