William Bradford was a major figure in early American historiography because his history of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth was a firsthand account of the entry of English settlers into the American wilderness and because he wrote about people who had deliberately separated themselves from European culture to create a distinctly American society.

Bradford was born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, England, early in the spring of 1590. His father, William Bradford, was a substantial yeoman farmer and his mother, Alice Hanson Bradford, the daughter of the village shopkeeper. Within a year of his birth his father died, and his mother soon remarried. Bradford was raised by a grandfather and uncles. He began to read the Geneva Bible at the age of twelve and attend a Puritan church, and, at the age of seventeen, in defiance of his family, he joined the Separatist congregation at Scrooby. He accompanied the congregation when...