Herbert Eugene Bolton

Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953) was an American historian who transformed the study of the colonial past by emphasizing the Spanish presence in North America. Born in Wisconsin, he taught at the University of Texas and Stanford before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for decades and directed the Bancroft Library. He wrote and edited many works on the Spanish borderlands, missions and explorers, and argued that the Americas should be studied as a whole. He supervised hundreds of graduate students, shaping the field of borderlands history.