Herbert Eugene Bolton - Career

Career

From 1901 to 1909, Bolton was a history professor at the University of Texas, where he taught medieval and European history. He became interested in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and in summer 1902 began traveling to Mexico in search of historical documents.

The Carnegie Institution asked Bolton to write a report of information found about United States history in Mexican archives, and the report was published in 1913. Soon afterward, Bolton became an associate editor of the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association (now the Southwestern Historical Quarterly).

In 1904, Bolton and Eugene C. Barker published With the Makers of Texas: A Source Reader in Texas History, a textbook. In 1906, Bolton began studying Native Americans in Texas for the Bureau of Ethnology, writing more than 100 articles for the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico.

In 1911, Bolton became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There he served as the chair of the history department for 22 years and became the first director of the renowned Bancroft Library. He taught the "History of the Americas" course, which enrolled up to a thousand students. At Berkeley he supervised more than 300 Masters Thesis and 104 doctoral dissertations. In 1914, Bolton published Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768-1780. A year later, Bolton published Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration and declined the presidency of the University of Texas.

Over the next 29 years, Bolton published many works, including Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century (1921), The Spanish Borderlands (1921), Outpost of Empire (1931), Rim of Christendom (1936) and Coronado (1949), for which he received a Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.

In 1932, Bolton served as president of the American Historical Association, and in 1944 retired as a professor. He taught briefly at San Francisco State College (now University) in retirement. He died of a stroke in Berkeley, California, in 1953.

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