Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Research Professor of History at Harvard University, where he taught American social history from 1973 to 2008. He was a member of the National Council for the Humanities from 2002 to 2008.

He was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and educated in the public schools of Port Huron and Battle Creek, Michigan. He graduated with highest honors from Northwestern University in 1956, and was awarded the Ph.D. by Harvard in 1962. He held appointments as assistant professor at Harvard, associate professor at Brandeis University, and professor at UCLA before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1973. In 1978-1979 he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and Professorial Fellow at Trinity College.

Thernstrom is the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) and the co-editor of Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity (2002) and Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (1969). His books include Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (1964), The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (1973), A History of the American People (1984), and (with his wife Abigail) America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997) and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003).

His writings have been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Harvard University Press Faculty Prize, the Waldo G. Leland Prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, the Peter Shaw Award, the Caldwell Award, and the Fordham Foundation Prize. In 2007, he and his wife Abigail received the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement. He has held fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the John M. Olin Foundation, and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mathematical Social Science Board, the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He also has written widely in periodicals for general audiences, including The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, The Public Interest, the Los Angeles Times, Commentary, and National Review.

He is currently writing a volume tentatively titled Don’t Call It Segregation: The Myth of Contemporary American Apartheid. Abigail Thernstrom will again be the co-author.

In addition, Thernstrom has served as an expert witness in more than two dozen federal cases involving claims of racial discrimination, and is the co-author of a brief in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, challenging the constitutionality of Seattle's racial balancing plan.