From Pacific Coast to Spanish Borderland: Herbert Eugene Bolton and the Reconfiguration of Western History

When Herbert E. Bolton arrived at the University of California in 1911, the mission of the history department and the Bancroft Library revolved around the idea of Pacific Coast History. Academic strategy fueled the wish of department chair H. Morse Stephens to base Cal's history program on something larger than studies of California history. He was influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner's Wisconsin program which studied the Old Northwest and by the developing focus on southwestern history at the University of Texas. To create a unique regional perspective for his institution, Stephens looked to the sea, establishing an Academy of Pacific Coast History to oversee the Bancroft Library. In 1917, when Stephens became the first western-based president of the AHA, he organized a symposium that produced the volume The Pacific Ocean in History.

After becoming chair of the history department in 1919, in addition to duties as Director of the Bancroft Library, Bolton rewrote the history curriculum and the collections policies of the Library to suit his own ideas about western regionalism. California, of course, still had to be the focus of historical studies, but Bolton wished to emphasize the Spanish colonial experience that he had long been studying. Under Bolton's guidance the graduate program produced more than 300 M.A. theses and over one hundred doctoral dissertations, many of which were published. Likewise, his students carried the regional history that Bolton taught to classrooms far from Berkeley. Thus, the Spanish Borderlands rather than the Pacific Rim became the regional focus of the University of California and a substantial part of the professorate who taught the history of the American West during the twentieth century.