Big Bone, Kentucky
Philip Alexander Bruce, perhaps the greatest of the historians of Old Virginia, wrote a huge volume of important work on the subject. In the Preface to his Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1907) he make a statement concerning the difficulty of finding material that directly concerns social life. It must all be inferred from other types of documents:
To acquire an accurate conception of the Virginian social life from 1607 to 1700, the student must examine a very large mass of miscellaneous printed and manuscript materials which are primarily concerned with other subjects . . .Almost anyone can write something, and call it "history", when there are plenty of documents that deal with the subject. We often find books that are little more than a patchwork quilt of quotations from so-called sources. These can be valuable as a kind of running index to published and MS. work, but they are usually not original in any significant way.
The best historians can write authoritatively when nothing seems to bear on the subject. That is the aim, at any rate, and that is the real challenge of the historian.
This is an Archival Quality Communication
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
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