Born in Wilton, Wisconsin, Herbert Bolton became one of the pioneers in Latin American history as well as the history of the southwestern United States. After an apprenticeship as a printer's devil and several years of teaching school, Bolton entered the University of Wisconsin to study law. While at the university, however, he came under the influence of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and his interest began shifting to history. After receiving a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, Bolton taught first at Milwaukee State Normal School and then at the University of Texas. Bolton's position at the University of Texas became a turning point in his career. Surrounded by evidences of Spanish and Mexican culture, he began to focus his studies and work on the history and culture of Latin America in relation to the United States. His first significant historical work, Guide to Materials for the History of the United States in the Principal Archives of Mexico (1913), proved to be a milestone in American historiography and launched him on a career that eventually made him the foremost Latin American historian of his time. In 1909, Bolton moved to first to Stanford University and then to the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1940. It was in California that his ideas matured, particularly his concept of the history of the Americas as a unifying theme in American history. At Berkeley, Bolton launched a new course titled History of the Americas, which became legendary on campus. As professor and chairman of the history department, his influence was enormous, and he attracted thousands of students from all over the United States, instilling in them the importance of Latin American history and its role in the history of the American Southwest. Out of his seminars came hundreds of doctoral dissertations and thousands of Masters' theses, an enormous contribution to knowledge from the classroom of one individual. In addition to his influence as a teacher, Bolton also contributed numbers of significant works. Among them are Spanish Exploration in the Southwest (1916), Anza's California Expeditions (1930), and History of the Americas (1935). The king of Spain honored Bolton in 1925 and decorated him as Comendador de la Real Orden de Isabel la Catolica. In 1949 Pope Pius XII named Bolton a Knight of St. Sylvester in recognition of his monumental labors in the history of the Catholic Church in the Americas. Bolton also received a Bancroft Prize in 1949 for his distinguished writings in American history. Bolton died in 1953.
