Nathan Irvin Huggins (January 14, 1927 – December 5, 1989) was a distinguished American historian, author and educator.

His father was Winston J. Huggins, an African-American waiter and railroad worker, and his mother was Marie Warsaw, a Jewish woman.

With careful scholarship and empathy, his 1977 book Black Odyssey tells the story of the self-creation of the African-American people.

Huggins wrote an important biography of Frederick Douglass and edited the biographical series Black Americans of Achievement.

[3] He was working on a major biography of the late Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche and on a shorter book about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States when he died.

Harvard students praised Huggins for "exceptional clarity and entertaining lectures" in a course he and a colleague taught on changing concepts of race in the United States.