In 1907, Howard Baskerville left America for the mission he’d been preparing for — his destination the American Memorial School in Tabriz, Persia, a campus established by American Presbyterian missionaries, where he planned to teach. Two years later, he died fighting for Iran’s people. For Baskerville, how he got there is less a story explained by his politics and more a story of his faith.
The Persian Constitutional Revolution, from 1905 to 1922, was, for Iran, as important as the American Revolutionary War was for the United States. And Baskerville became the American to Iran as the Marquis de Lafayette, the French revolutionary hero, was to the United States. That’s how Reza Aslan, author of Baskerville’s biography, An American Martyr in Persia, would describe the weight of B