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  • The Contested Legacy of a Romantic Historian
  • Thomas Devaney (bio)
Albert L. Hurtado. Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xvi + 370 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

When Frederick Jackson Turner redefined the concept of “frontier” in his famous 1893 address, he spoke against the idea that the roots of American institutions could be found in medieval antecedents. Indeed, he later wrote that it was this idea, popular in his time, that led him to develop the frontier theory.1 It is thus a bit ironic that his most successful student—Herbert Eugene Bolton—should also have studied with and been inspired by the preeminent American medievalist of Turner’s generation, Charles Homer Haskins. Bolton’s later work displayed the influence of both of these mentors. From Turner, he gained not only an interest in frontier history but also an appreciation for the Big Idea. But, like Haskins, Bolton was a proponent of “scientific history” who scoured archives and built a documentary edifice to undergird his work. In terms of subject matter, however, Bolton followed directly in the footsteps of neither. Instead, his disparate training and his early career path allowed him to carve out a new field of historical inquiry: the Spanish borderlands, which he defined as those regions “belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for centuries” (p. 125). Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Bolton not only held up early Spanish conquerors as heroic figures but also argued that historians must examine the borderlands—the Southwest especially—from a transnational, even hemispheric, perspective.

The dichotomy between these stances—Bolton the colonial apologist and Bolton the broad-minded advocate for a multicultural understanding of the borderlands—is one of the themes of Albert Hurtado’s Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. In this book, Hurtado draws on a wealth of archival and published sources, as well as nearly thirty years of research on the subject, to offer an engaging portrait of Bolton’s career and life. In doing so, he provides a relevant update to an earlier Bolton biography, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man, 1870–1953 (1978). The author of that book, John Francis Bannon, was a Bolton student and distinguished scholar [End Page 303] in his own right whose deep admiration for his former mentor comes through on every page. Hurtado stands at more of a distance, able to weigh Bolton’s “debatable legacy” (p. 265) from multiple perspectives. This is not a simple biography, however. Although Bolton’s personal story is the central theme of this book, Hurtado weaves his travails and accomplishments into the context of institutional history and the evolution of the historical profession. One need not be a borderlands historian or even familiar with Bolton’s ideas to appreciate Hurtado’s deft telling of a career whose impact extended well beyond articles published or students taught.

The organization of the book is chronological, and Hurtado begins with his subject’s childhood on a Wisconsin farm. There’s a sense, especially in these early sections, that Hurtado shares Bolton’s appreciation for the romantic. And so we hear of Bolton’s parents “working the raw land to build a new life for themselves” (p. 6) while Bolton himself and his brother decided that education would allow them to escape the rural life. This is presented as a quintessential American story in which hard work, family ties (Bolton and brother Fred alternated work and study to help each other pay their way), and talent led to success. Bolton eventually matriculated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met Turner and Haskins and decided upon a career in history. He stayed on at Madison for the first part of his graduate studies, but completed his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1899. After a year of teaching in Milwaukee, Bolton accepted a position in medieval European history at the University of Texas. While in Austin, Bolton became enamored with Southwestern history as a field in which he could make his mark. He learned Spanish, visited archives in Mexico, and began what would be...

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