The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 43, July 1939 - April, 1940 Page: 535

Book Reviews

American language know the idiom in which his exploits are
recorded.
MODY C. BOATRIGHT.
The University of Texas.
Wider Horizons of American History. By Herbert E. Bolton.
(New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1939. Pp. xv, 191.
$1.50.)
In the midst of a life crowded with the details of successful
teaching and research, Professor Bolton has paused at significant
points in his extraordinary career to present an illuminating
essay, characterized in each instance by a broadening view of
the field of American history. These syntheses not only gave point
and meaning to Professor Bolton's own research, but also pro-
foundly influenced the work of an entire generation of scholars
to the extent that a "Bolton School" of historians has come into
being and the writers of so-called "straight United States history"
have been forced to take cognizance of a new and more realistic
interpretation of the field. He has performed an invaluable service
in releasing American historiography from the provincial bonds of
a narrowly nationalistic approach.
The Appleton-Century Historical Essays series and its editor,
William E. Lingelbach, have rendered a real service in making
these essays more widely and conveniently available. The first,
"The Epic of Greater America," was the presidential address
delivered at the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association at Toronto, in 1932. It was printed in the
April, 1933, number of The American Historical Review and, in
Spanish translation, has enjoyed great vogue south of the Rio
Grande. The second, "The Significance of the Borderlands," was
read at the Boulder Conference on the History of the Trans-
Mississippi West in June, 1929, and was published in the printed
proceedings of that conference in the next year. The third, "The
Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colo-
nies," was the Faculty Research Lecture at the University of
California, at Berkeley, in March, 1917, and was printed in The
American Historical Review in October, 1917. The final essay,
"The Black Robes of New Spain," was presented before the Fif-
teenth Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Historical As-

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