Publications
His 1970 publication ''The Spanish Borderland Frontier, 1513-1821'' was one of the volumes in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston "Histories of the American Frontier" and became the seminal work on Borderlands for many years. In a 1972 review, Bannon was described as a "prominent scholar of the 'Bolton School'", referring to Herbert Eugene Bolton, whose 1892 publication ''The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle Old Florida and the Southwest'', which highlighted contributions of Spanish northern frontiersmen, was a catalyst for a generation of historians. For many decades, Bolton and his numerous students published prolifically on the interactions between the Spanish frontiersmen, indigenous Americans, French Canadians arriving from the North, and Anglo-Americans from the east. Bannon provided a "new synthesis based on this vast wealth of information and on his own research." Bannon focused on the successful Spanish expansion from eastern Texas westward, in what was then the frontiers of New Spain. He traced the histories of the "conquistador explorers, missionaries, soldiers, settlers, government officials, and merchants of the immense territory from Florida to California and across the north Mexican provinces."References
Further reading
* David J. Weber. "John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands: Retrospect and Prospect" in ''Journal of the Southwest'' Vol. 29, no. 4, Winter 1987. * Weber, David J. "The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography." ''Magazine of History'' (Organization of American historians, 2000): 5-11. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bannon, John Francis 1905 births 1986 deaths Saint Louis University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni 20th-century American Jesuits Saint Louis University faculty 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Historians of Latin America 20th-century American male writers