American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BRADFORD, WILLIAM

Picture
(March, 1590, Austerfield, England-9 May 1657, Plymouth, MA). Education: Unknown. Career: Governor, Plymouth Colony, 1621-33, 1635, 1637, 1639-43, 1645-57. 

Born into a yeoman family in 1590, William Bradford was raised by uncles after the early death of his father. At twelve years of age he became interested in the Bible, and at sixteen he joined the separatist congregation meeting at William Brewster's* house in Scrooby. In 1609 Bradford was one of the Puritans who followed Brewster into exile, living in Amsterdam, then Leyden, Holland. Bradford supported himself as an artisan and read widely in theology. He might well have died in obscurity, but for the next move by the Pilgrims, across the ocean to New England. 

One of the survivors of the hard Plymouth winter of 1620-21, Bradford became governor of the fledgling Pilgrim colony in 1621 when the first governor, John Carver, died. During the remainder of his life Bradford was reelected governor thirty times. He contributed much substance to the mythical picture of the Pilgrims as decent, pious, hard-working men and women. He served many years as governor without salary, gave his own money to help pay the colony's debts, and died without haying amassed a personal fortune-as he might have done. A devout Puritan, he was nonetheless tolerant of other faiths and even entertained a Catholic priest in his home. 

Fortunately, Bradford was also a writer, and he left a history of Plymouth, which many regard as the classic of colonial American literature. No one captured better than Bradford the simple piety and dedication of the Puritans in a new world: "Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element." 

Bibliography 
A: Letter-book fragment, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, ser. 1, vol. 3, 27-84; A History of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (New York, 1952). 
B: DAB 2, 559-63; DARB, 60-61; NCAB 7, 368-69; James Shepard, Governor William Bradford (New Britain, Conn., 1900); Albert H. Plumb, William Bradford of Plymouth (Boston, 1920); Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth (Philadelphia, 1951).