Herbert Eugene Bolton

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

8 min readJul 21, 2023

Today is the 153rd anniversary of the birth of Herbert Eugene Bolton (20 July 1870–30 January 1953), who was born in Wisconsin on this date in 1870.

Bolton is remembered for the “Bolton Thesis” (or “Bolton theory”), which is the view the history of the Americas is properly hemispherical history, and should be understood and taught as such. Bolton, then, is part of a larger pattern of the expansion of historical inquiry. Here is how Bolton described the task of the historian of the western hemisphere from his 1933 paper “The Epic of Greater America”:

“In recent years the range of investigation in Western Hemisphere history has vastly broadened. This is due in no small part to the influence of Jameson’s guides to foreign archives; to the work of American and Canadian scholars on British America; of the students of the Caribbean; of the historians of the frontier; of the whole galaxy of Hispanists; of the social, economic, institutional, cultural, and diplomatic historians, the international relationists, and a host of others. Our historical data have not only become greater in amount but much more complex in character. Phases and factors formerly undreamed of have come to light. Many of the new discoveries do not fit into the nationalistic pattern… a larger framework will call for data which we do not possess, and thus suggest a thousand new things to do. A classic example of the influence of a new synthesis is found in the multitude of investigators whom Turner set to work to fill out his elementary sketch. A report by a recent committee of historians complains that many doctoral thesis subjects in United States history have been cultivated past the point of diminishing returns. A larger synthesis of American history, I am sure, would do much to relieve this rather pathetic situation. Who has written the history of the introduction of European plants and animals into the Western Hemisphere as a whole, or of the spread of cattle and horse raising from Patagonia to Labrador? Who has written on a Western Hemisphere scale the history of shipbuilding and commerce, mining, Christian missions, Indian policies, slavery and emancipation, constitutional development, arbitration, the effects of the Indian on European cultures, the rise of the common man, art, architecture, literature, or science? Who has tried to state the significance of the frontier in terms of the Americas?”

Of the Bolton Thesis Mario T. Garcia wrote:

“It was Bolton’s purpose to suggest that there exists common threads in the histories of the American nation-states, indeed, in the histories of all American people. And that each national history can best be understood in relation to that of the other American nations. What do these nations, these people, have in common? Bolton believed there are many similarities in the backgrounds of the American nations. Similarities in colonial systems exist: each experienced the effects of mercantalism, feudalism, black slavery, of the subjugation of the Native Americans, and of the influence of the frontier. Each faced the issue of independence, of consolidating that independence, and of structuring a nation-state. This is not to imply that Bolton did not believe there existed differences in America, but as Lewis Hanke suggests, Bolton simply judged it wiser to stress similarities because of the previous emphasis on the gulf between the United States and the rest of the Americas. Similarities, common history, the ‘Epic of Greater America,’ this is what Bolton deemed important.”

Bolton started out as an historian of the American west, and came to his idea of hermispherical history by way of pushing outward from the American heartland into the “borderlands.” Explicit studies of borderlands as borderlands are now more familiar, but in Bolton’s time it was virtually a new area of historical scholarship. Wilbur R. Jacobs wrote of Bolton on borderlands:

“His borderlands history struck many historians as ‘way out’ — a fringe area to Spanish America, and a fringe area to the United States and thus to the American West. If that were so, there would be fewer historians eligible to listen to him than to Frederick Jackson Turner, who generalized on the whole West and, in fact, on the whole nation, or to Walter Prescott Webb, who generalized on the whole world. His Spanish borderlands are rejected by Latin Americanists and neglected by historians of the West. The general histories and bibliographies of Latin America often are constructed as though these outlying provinces were never Spanish. Western writers tend to treat them as though they were an exotic prior figuration extraneous to all that developed later.”

We can see from this that the Bolton Thesis was not immediately embraced. Indeed, even today it is not a well known idea — certainly it is much less familiar than the Turner Thesis. But the two ideas are not entirely disjoint: Turner’s frontier can be understood as a special case of a borderland — a borderland between civilization and the wilderness — and Bolton’s hemispherical history can be understood as a generalization of the Turner Thesis, among other things.

It is worth noting that Bolton was a student of Frederick Jackson Turner who is said to have rejected the Turner Thesis, i.e., the role of the frontier in shaping American life, which is usually interpreted as a key constituent of American exceptionalism. One can see the logic at work here: insofar as US history must be seen in the context of wider hemispherical history, this calls American exceptionalism into question. I don’t think that Bolton would have denied the vital role of the frontier in American history, but that he would have expanded this to the role of the frontiers in the Americas, so that the Turner Thesis takes on a generalized form in the western hemisphere.

It is also worth noting that the arguments Bolton makes for hemispherical history can be extended to planetary history. The introduction of European plants and animals into the Western Hemisphere has a prehistory is the distribution of plants and animals in the Old World before Columbus, and it has a counterpart in the introduction of plants and animals from the Americas into the Old World, the totality of which we today call the Columbian Exchange. Similarly, the history of shipbuilding and commerce, mining, Christian missions, Indian policies, slavery and emancipation, constitutional development, arbitration, and so on all have a planetary history that is the larger context of hemispherical history.

It would be convenient to be able to set up a tidy schematism of how history has evolved from nationalism, through regionalism, which includes hemispherical history, and ultimately issues in planetary history, but that is a little too tidy to be true. However, this can be a fruitful approach to understand what went on in history in greater detail. Suppose we identify the high point of nationalistic European historiography as being the nineteenth century. If we do this, perhaps identifying figures like Jules Michelet, under the influence of Giambattista Vico, we have to acknowledge that, at the same time, von Ranke was bringing to maturity a method of source criticism in historical writing that many still consider to be the definitive standard of historical writing, and Ranke himself began a monumental universal history that he never finished. So the 19th century was by no means an unchallenged time of nationalistic history, although we do find so of the most influential national histories being written at this time.

However, national histories need not be exclusively understood as being hidebound and provincial. The history of a nation entire, especially such a history that seeks the earliest origins of a people in time, represents a more comprehensive historical inquiry than the local histories that were written by antiquarians. Also, there is the question of what came before nationalistic histories. Partly the answer to this is the local histories just mentioned, but we have to go back all the way to Herodotus to find all the many traditions of historical writings and the relative degree of comprehensiveness involved. Herodotus was rather more comprehensive than Thucydides, but Thucydides gained in clarity by narrowing his focus on the Peloponnesian War. The two histories are, in a sense, very different histories due to their author’s differing conceptions of the historian’s task. And, still in antiquity, Augustine’s City of God was a kind of early universal history, and it inspired more modern universal histories as in the work of Bossuet.

What I think we can say here is that the idea of the nation-state with a distinctive national history took time to develop from the formal establishment of the nation-state system following the Thirty Years’ War and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). A hundred and fifty years later, with the Enlightenment intervening and the nineteenth century beginning (along with the industrial revolution, which led to many European nation-states questioning their identity because of the wrenching changes that came among as a result of industrialization), the nation-state was sufficiently familiar that it could be thematized as an object of history. Prior to the Treaty of Westphalia, the nation-state did not effectively exist (except in the most tenuous anticipations), so there could be no history of it written. After the advent of the nation-state, it still took time for the nation-state to mature as an object of historical scholarship.

By the same reasoning, we can see pre-nationalistic historiography as the prehistory of history, which has a history of thousands of years. Once we reach the age of nation-states and nationalistic history, then history can can begin to become more comprehensive, passing through regional history and hemispherical history, to eventually arrive at planetary history. Under this schematism, universal histories of the early modern period represent an anticipation of the “true” universal histories yet to be written after the dawn of planetary history. Obviously I don’t take this entirely seriously (hence the scare quotes), but, again, it is worth thinking about.

Further Resources

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