Rob Goldberg is an historian of American childhood, toys, and play. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Head of the History Department at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia.

Radical Play is Rob’s first book.

Rob was recently a featured historian in the History Channel series The Toys That Built America, joining a group of pop culture scholars and toy industry experts to recount the Cabbage Patch Kid craze and Garbage Pail Kid spinoff of the 1980s (season two, episode six). His research on the history of Shindana Toys and the American toy industry has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the American Journal of Play. He has given talks on the history of toys at the Strong Museum of Play, Bard Graduate Center, Winterthur Museum, and the Business History Conference.

In 2019, Rob joined public historian Yolanda Hester and novelist and educator David Crittendon in forming the Operation Bootstrap History Collaborative. The Collaborative's mission is to document and share the remarkable yet little known story of Operation Bootstrap, Inc., a pioneering community development corporation founded in South Los Angeles a few months after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and best known for creating Shindana Toys as one of its subsidiary businesses.