Steven Mintz is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of seventeen books on American history, families and the life course, and higher education. He has taught at Columbia, Oberlin, Pepperdine, Harvard Extension, the University of Houston, and Germany’s Universität Siegen, and held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. His books include Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood , The Learning-Centered University (2024), and, most recently, The American Child: The Transformation of Childhood Since World War II (Oxford University Press, 2025), co-authored with Peter N. Stearns. He writes regularly on history, education, culture, and contemporary life on Substack, bringing historical perspective to questions of how we live, learn, and make sense of the present.