An experienced lawyer, businessman, and newspaper editorial writer, Philip Alexander Bruce eventually chose the life of the quiet scholar and wrote over two million words dealing with the social and economic history of the South. Today he is primarily remembered for his five volumes on the economic, institutional, and social history of seventeenth-century Virginia. These works are still cited as standard references because Bruce was painstaking in his research and a pioneer in the use of colonial court records as a source of historical interpretation. While it is true that errors of fact and interpretation can be found in these volumes, time has been kind to Bruce's history in general. Even the aspects of the author's findings which have been attacked most widely--his interpretation of the origins of Virginia's higher planter class, for example--have been partly revived by such subsequent scholars as Louis B. Wright.

A descendant of...