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. In later years, he shifted his research interests to the constitutional, diplomatic, and political history of the American Revolution and the making of the United States Constitution.
Background
Richard Brandon Morris was born on July 24, 1904, in New York City. He attended high school at Townsend Harris Hall in New York City. In 1924, he received a BA degree from City College. In 1925, he received an MA from Columbia University, and in 1930 he received a PhD in history at the university with Evarts Boutell Greene as his dissertation advisor. Morris' 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, though at the time it attracted bitter denunciations from law school practitioners of legal historym, including Julius Goebel, Jr. and Karl Llewellyn, both then Columbia Law School faculty members.
Career
City College of New York
In 1927, Morris began teaching History at the City College of New York until in 1946 he was named to the faculty of Columbia University, after having published Government and Labor in Early America (1946).
Columbia University
In 1949, Morris left City College to teach at Columbia University. Eventually, he became Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia (no relation), Richard B. Morris continued his pioneering research and writing.
Morris was opposed to the Columbia University protests of 1968, and the agenda of the radicals.
Project '87
In 1976, following the general scholarly disappointment with the bicentennial of the American Revolution, Morris, then president of the American Historical Association, joined with James MacGregor Burns, then president of the American Political Science Association, to found Project '87—a joint effort to mark the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Project '87 brought together historians, political scientists, and legal scholars and managed to salvage the Constitution's bicentennial as an occasion for the publication of groundbreaking new historical and legal scholarship on the Constitution and its origins. Morris's own contribution to the Bicentennial, and the culmination of his life's work as a historian, was The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789, his 1987 volume for the New American Nation series.
Personal life and death
In 1930, Morris married Berenice Robinson; they had two sons, Jeffrey B. Morris, a constitutional and legal historian who teaches at the Touro Law School in New York, and Donald R. Morris, a teacher in Wyoming.
Morris died age 84 in New York City of melanoma cancer.