The Age of the Reformation

Preserved Smith (July 22, 1880 - May 15, 1941) was an American historian of the Protestant Reformation. He was the son of Henry Preserved Smith, a noted scholar of the Old Testament, and inherited his name from a line of Puritan ancestors stretching back to the seventeenth century. He attended Amherst College and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in 1907, and continued studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin. Like his mentor James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, he had a high respect for science and a belief that knowledge of history was a way to improve human prospects for the future. He taught at Cornell University as a member of the Department of History from 1923 to 1941.