David J. Weber

The Spanish Borderlands, Historiography Redux.

THE WORD BORDERLANDS has many meanings in North American historiography, but this short overview focuses on the time and place that American historians have long known as the Spanish Borderlands. Historian Herbert Eugene Bolton, the much-studied father of what came to be known as the Bolton School, popularized the term Spanish Borderlands in a little book of the same title, published by Yale in 1921. The University of New Mexico Press reprinted that volume in 1996, with a fine introduction by Al Hurtado, who is completing a biography of Bolton. Bolton taught the history of the Americas, South as well as North, and ranged across Latin America in his pioneering transnational work.2 In much of his writing, however, he aimed to add a Spanish dimension to the Anglo-centric history of the United States. That was certainly the case with his little book on the Spanish Borderlands. Bolton defined the Spanish Borderlands as those parts of the United States once claimed by Spain, from California to Florida, thus situating the Borderlands within the framework of United States history. My own survey of the field, The Spanish Frontier in North America, published in 1992, followed Boltons anachronistic model of placing a