Within American historiography, Herbert Eugene Bolton ( 1870-1953) holds
a unique position because of the various directions his studies took. On
one level he is listed among "sectional historians" of the United States -- a
Western historian who stressed Spain's contribution to North American
history. ¹ He stressed the colonial history of the underbelly of the United
States from Florida to California. He coined a term and developed a school
called the Spanish Borderlands. However, despite errors in interpretation,
Bolton was more than a sectional historian. Going beyond traditional no-
tions of United States history and beyond his mentors, John Bach McMaster
and Frederick Jackson Turner, he stressed both the comparative nature of
United States colonial history and, his crowning achievement, the history
of the Americas concept. Bolton conceived a "Universal American His-
tory, that is the history of the Americas from the North Pole to the South
Pole and from Columbus to Now." If Western civilization could be stud-
ied as a unit, then why not the Western Hemisphere?

In 1919, early in the development of the history of the Americas con-
cept, Bolton described this new form of synthetic history. He based the
concept on certain aspects of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier theory.
Bolton saw the importance of the coming of European civilization into the
New World. It entered the Americas, developed within the new environ-
ment, and eventually created the various independent nations and expe-
riences of the nineteenth century. Thus Bolton's history of the Americas
started with the general European background, and the cultural and insti-
tutional premises of American history, followed by the occupation of the
American continents and the transmission of European civilization in the
particular national variations (Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Rus-
sian, Spanish, and Swedish), and ended with colonial expansion and in-

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