Preserved Smith

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 scholar of the Old Testament,[1][2] and inherited his name from a line of Puritan ancestors stretching back to the 17th century.

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.

[3] His doctoral dissertation was a critical study of the Table Talk of Martin Luther and he wrote major biographies of Luther and Erasmus.