Jeremy Belknap, Congregational clergyman and historian, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph Belknap, a leather dresser and furrier, and Sarah Byles Belknap, a niece of the Reverend Mather Byles. Originally named Jeremiah by his parents, he later took the shortened form of his name. After graduating from Harvard in 1762 Belknap taught school and studied theology at Milton, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth and Greenland, New Hampshire, before settling at the first Congregational church of Dover, New Hampshire, in 1767. Shortly thereafter he married Ruth Eliot of Boston.

Belknap enthusiastically supported the American Revolution, and he believed that with the birth of a new political order, a new literary order must also arise. In 1780 he wrote, "Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government." In 1787, after considering an offer to edit a newly formed magazine in Philadelphia, Belknap accepted a call to...