This history of the Pilgrims and their colony was originally written between 1630 and 1650.

William Bradford was born in a comfortable Yorkshire yeoman's home, but the family that might have provided him with a nurturing beginning was disrupted by the early death of Bradford's parents. Raised by his uncles to be a farmer, Bradford was a sickly youth given to private reading. In early adolescence, Bradford first heard the preaching of Richard Clyfton, a nonconformist minister who converted Bradford to the Separatist movement. A lifelong commitment to that church followed; Bradford first joined the Scrooby congregation, later migrated to Holland in 1608, and sailed with the Pilgrims in 1620. Shortly after his arrival in what is present-day Massachusetts, Bradford was elected governor of the Plymouth settlement. Bradford's principal literary contributions lie in the area of history. His account of the Puritans' early settlement provides both an invaluable document of early American life and a powerful example of how Puritan theology found expression in the literal events of history. Both Puritan theologian Cotton Mather and contemporary critics hailed Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (1856) as a masterpiece. Bradford's work frames the development of the Americas in biblical terms that illustrate the purposes of an omnipotent God. Bradford also employed verse in his exploration of Providence. His Collected Verse consists of largely didactic meditations. Widely read, Bradford's work influenced several generations of Puritan intellectuals. Bradford died in 1657.

Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston in 1887. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 and began teaching history there in 1915, becoming full professor in 1925 and Jonathan Trumbull professor of American history in 1941. He served as the university's official historian and wrote a three-volume history of the institution, the Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, which was completed in 1936. Between 1922 and 1925 he was Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford. He also was an accomplished sailor who retired from the navy in 1951 as a rear admiral. In preparing for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of Christopher Columbus and John Paul Jones, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1941) and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1952) he took himself out of the study and onto the high seas, where he traced the voyages of his subjects and "lived" their stories insofar as possible. When it came time for the U.S. Navy to select an author to write a history of its operations in World War II, Morison was the natural choice for the task. In 1942, Morison was commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to write a history of U.S. naval operations in World War II and given the rank of lieutenant commander. The 15 volumes of his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II appeared between 1947 and 1962. Although he retired from Harvard in 1955, Morison continued his research and writing. A product of the Brahmin tradition, Morison wrote about Bostonians and other New Englanders and about life in early Massachusetts. He was an "American historian" in the fullest sense of the term. He also had a keen appreciation for the larger history of the nation and world, provincial is the last word one would use to describe Morison's writing.