Herbert Eugene Bolton's chief contributions to historical literature were in a field of his own making: the "Spanish Borderlands" of Northern New Spain and Florida, which had been neglected by United States and Latin American historians alike. Frequently ranked with Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb as a historian of the American frontier, Bolton was equally at home on the Spanish-American one and believed that a complete history of either hemisphere must investigate Spain's empire in North America.

Herbert Eugene Bolton was born to Edwin L. and Rosaline Cady Bolton on a farm in Wisconsin, a background to which he credited his hardy constitution. At the University of Wisconsin, where he received his bachelor of letters degree in 1895, he studied under Frederick Jackson Turner but did not find his own métier. He did not find it at the University of Pennsylvania either, where his dissertation...