John Musser (November 14, 1889 – March 21, 1949) was an American historian and educator who was dean of the graduate school at New York University and an instructor of American History.^[1][2]

Musser attended Franklin and Marshall College before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received his bachelor's degree.^[3] He went on to also earn his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania under the direction of Herman Vandenburg Ames.^[4] An authority on Benjamin Franklin, in 1937 Musser debunked a claim made by the Nazi Party that Charles Pinkney had once recorded in his diary that Franklin had made an anti-Semitic prophecy about a future threat of Jews in the United States by noting that Pinckney had never kept a diary and that Franklin himself had once donated money for the construction of a synagogue in Philadelphia.^[5]

He was the grandfather of Charles Musser.^[6]