Theodore Beza

Henry Martyn Baird (1832-1906), American historian and educationalist, was son of Robert Baird (1798-1863), a Presbyterian preacher and author who worked in both the United States and Europe. Baird spent eight years of his early youth with his father in Paris and Geneva, and in 1850 graduated from New York University. He then lived for two years in Italy and Greece, was a student at the Union Theological Seminary in New York city from 1853 to 1855, and in 1856 graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a tutor for four years at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and from 1859 until his death was a professor of Greek language and literature at New York University.

He is best known, however, as a historian of the Huguenots. His work, which appeared in three parts - ’History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France’ (2 vols., 1879), ’The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre’ (2 vols., 1886), and ’The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes’ (2 vols., 1895) - is described by the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica as being characterized by painstaking thoroughness, by a judicial temper, and by scholarship of a high order. In addition to this work, published in 1899, he published ’Modern Greece: A Narrative of a Residence and Travels in that Country’ (1856) and a biography of his father entitled ’The Life of the Rev. Robert Baird, D.D.’ (1866). He died in New York city in November of 1906.