Encyclopedia of American History

Richard Brandon Morris (July 24, 1904 - March 3, 1989) was an American historian best known for his pioneering work in colonial American legal history and the early history of American labor. Morris received his B.A. degree from City College in 1924. He attended Columbia Law School and at the same time earned his Ph.D. degree in history at Columbia University. His dissertation, published by Columbia University Press as Studies in the History of American Law, with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1930), still defines the research agenda for historians working on early American law. Morris taught at City College until in 1946 he was named to the faculty of Columbia University, after having published his massive and definitive Government and Labor in Early America (1946).