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  • Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands by Albert Hurtado
  • Jay T. Harrison
Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. By Albert Hurtado. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. 386. Illustrations, figure, notes, bibliography, index.)

With his new biography of Herbert Eugene Bolton, Albert Hurtado joins a select group of historians whose fascination with Bolton’s vast corpus and influence led them to examine this celebrated historian of the North American borderlands. Hurtado bridges the gap that many before him left un-spanned: that place defined on the one side by Bolton’s books and articles, his seminal lectures, his large following of graduate students, and his ideas on teaching a new history of the Americas, and on the other side by Bolton the person, whose private and professional lives were both exceptional and ordinary in various aspects.

In most ways this is a typical examination of a great life. Hurtado follows Bolton from farm to school, from family trauma to family victories, all just to get this great historian into normal school. Once there, Herbert’s desire to follow in the footsteps of his brother Fred provides another ordinary trope of fraternal influence, entirely understandable, to explain the motivations of the Bolton brothers and their efforts to rise above the status quo. But there is more to this story, as Hurtado grounds the work ethic of Bolton and his brother in these difficult years of youth. They applied their work ethic to academia after the turn of the twentieth century when they moved away from their native Wisconsin. Hurtado follows Herbert’s next steps to graduate school in Pennsylvania, back to the Midwest, and then down to Texas where he became a productive scholar.

The Texas years were busy, tenuous times for young Professor Bolton. Hurtado’s insights into these years provide needed answers for those who wish to understand the early motivations that led Bolton into the Spanish-language archives of Mexico [End Page 77] and Texas. It was in Austin that the first inklings of a hemispheric history of the Americas came to Bolton. Hurtado explains that he found a new world of study there, one that transformed into a desire to amass and direct research in the best collection possible of Spanish sources about the southwestern United States and Mexico. He would accomplish this goal, but not in Texas; however, before leaving the Lone Star State, Bolton began his marvelous corpus of works on the borderlands. Some of these articles and books continue to be useful to Texas scholars for their accurate narration of certain events during the eighteenth century.

The remaining chapters focus on Bolton’s professional life and family once the professor was won over to the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bancroft Library. Bolton’s relentless work sessions, his extensive graduate student following, and his affinity for broad statements are the stuff of other books on the man, and Hurtado addresses the same themes. But he asks newer questions not addressed by John Francis Bannon or other Bolton biographers. How did Bolton view women? Was he open to minorities, and if so, was he a fighter for rights in the academy? By weaving his narrative with questions like these, Hurtado addresses Bolton the man and Bolton the scholar in terms of his time and ours. No scholar trained in the Boltonian wake will regret reading this book. Students and scholars of the American West and the colonial borderlands will find it particularly useful due to Hurtado’s mastery of the Bolton historiography.

Jay T. Harrison
Fort Lewis College
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