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Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. By John L. Kessell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2002. Pp. xvii, 462. $45.00.)
Herbert Eugene Bolton, before and during his tenure in the history department at the University of California from 1911 until his death in 1953, initiated the serious study of the areas in the United States colonized by Spain. In 1921 the publication of his book, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, provided Spanish colonial North America with the name it has been associated with ever since. For much of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, Bolton and his students dominated the field of Spanish Borderlands studies, producing an outpouring of hundreds of scholarly articles and books on three hundred years of Spanish activities from California to Florida. For the most part, the Boltonians stressed the heroic achievements of individual Spaniards and the positive contributions of Hispanic institutions and culture. The exploits of intrepid Spanish explorers and priests were particularly emphasized by these historians. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Bolton characterized the Franciscan mission as the most representative-read "civilizing"-frontier institution in the Spanish Borderlands. In 1963 one of Bolton's students, John Francis Bannon, a Jesuit,...