ABSTRACT
In his 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association entitled ‘The Epic of Greater America’, Herbert Eugene Bolton called for ‘a broader treatment of American history, to supplement the purely nationalist presentation to which we are accustomed … and [which] helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists’.1 Earlier in his career Bolton had fashioned his Spanish ‘borderlands model’ as an alternative to Frederick Jackson Turner’s argument that the frontier was the crucible of America’s democratic exceptionalism.2
Bolton challenged the nationalist presumptions of most American historians, suggesting that much of what they wrote was connected to broader processes affecting both Europe and the Americas. He called as well for a grand synthesis based upon a transnational and comparative approach to the past. ‘It is my purpose, by a few bold strokes’, he wrote, ‘to suggest that … [the seemingly different experiences of the southwestern frontier and borderlands and America’s seaboard colonies] are but phases common to most portions of the Western Hemisphere; that each local story will have a clearer meaning when studied in the light of others: and that much of what has been written of each national history is but a thread of a larger strand’.3
