Spanish Borderlands

Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953) was a distinguished historian who received a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1899. He was a Harrison Fellow while at Pennsylvania. Bolton quickly became an expert on Spanish colonies in the New World. Professor Bolton began his pioneering work on the Spanish Borderlands—an area that begins in Florida and extends along a "crescent shaped" land mass between Georgia and California—as a professor at UT Austin. Starting in 1902, he undertook several research trips to Mexico to examine archival materials relating to the United States. His first significant publication was a textbook coauthored with Eugene C. Barker, With the Makers of Texas: A Source Reader in Texas History (1904). After studying the history of native peoples in Texas for the United States Bureau of Ethnology, he wrote more than 100 articles for the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. He continued to publish works about Texas after he left the region for California. Among these were Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768-1780 (1914) and Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (1915). Professor Bolton's research resulted in nearly 100 works, including approximately 24 books he either wrote or edited. In 1920, Bolton published The Spanish Borderlands, a comprehensive overview of the young United States’ border with colonies still held by Spain at the beginning of the 19th century.