See M. and J. Neuhart and R. Eames, Eames Design (1989); P. Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (1995); D. Albrecht, ed., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (1997); J. Barkley, Eames House (2001); E. Demetrios, An Eames Primer (2002).
See his The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (2007); his selected letters (3 vol., 1993-99); D. Weitzmann, Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row (2000); biographies by N. Cherkovski (rev. ed. 1997), H. Sounes (1999), M. G. Baughan (2004), and B. Miles (2006); studies by H. Fox (1968), J. Sherman (1982), R. Harrison (1994), G. Locklin (1995), J. J. Smith, ed. (1995), G. Brewer and F. Day, ed. (1997), J. Christy (1997), J. Thomas (1997), and B. Pleasants (2004); bibliography by A. Krumhansi (1999).
See biographies by J. R. Alden (1951) and S. W. Patterson (1958).
See G. C. Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (1969).
See his selected writings (1967); study by T. Simey and M. Simey (1960).
See biography by C. Hare (1911).
See biography by his wife, Elsa Lanchester (1938); S. Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (1987, repr. 1997).
The son of a naval clerk, Dickens spent his early childhood in London and in Chatham. When he was 12 his father was imprisoned for debt, and Charles was compelled to work in a blacking warehouse. He never forgot this double humiliation. At 17 he was a court stenographer, and later he was an expert parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle. His sketches, mostly of London life (signed Boz), began appearing in periodicals in 1833, and the collection Sketches by Boz (1836) was a success.
Soon Dickens was commissioned to write burlesque sporting sketches; the result was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37), which promptly made Dickens and his characters, especially Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick, famous. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who was to bear him 10 children; the marriage, however, was never happy. Dickens had a tender regard for Catherine's sister Mary Hogarth, who died young, and a lifelong friendship with another sister, Georgina Hogarth.
The early-won fame never deserted Dickens. His readers were eager and ever more numerous, and Dickens worked vigorously for them, producing novels that appeared first in monthly installments and then were made into books. Oliver Twist (in book form, 1838) was followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and by two works originally intended to start a series called Master Humphrey's Clock: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Barnaby Rudge (1841).
Dickens wrote rapidly, sometimes working on more than one novel at a time, and usually finished an installment just when it was due. Haste did not prevent his loosely strung and intricately plotted books from being the most popular novels of his day. When he visited America in 1842, he was received with ovations but awakened some displeasure by his remarks on copyright protection and his approval of the abolition of slavery. He replied with sharp criticism of America in American Notes (1842) and the novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1843). The first of his Christmas books was the well-loved A Christmas Carol (1843). In later years other short novels and stories written for the season followed, notably The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth.
Dickens lived in Italy in 1844 and in Switzerland in 1846. Dombey and Son (1848) was the first in a string of triumphant novels including David Copperfield (1850), his own favorite novel, which was partly autobiographical; Bleak House (1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1861); and Our Mutual Friend (1865). In 1856 he bought his long-desired country home at Gadshill. Two years later, because of Dickens's attentions to a young actress, Ellen Ternan, his wife ended their marriage by formal separation. Her sister Georgina remained with Dickens to care for his household and the younger children.
Dickens was working furiously, editing and contributing to the magazines Household Words (1850-59) and All the Year Round (1858-70) and managing amateur theatricals. To these labors he added platform readings from his own works; three tours in the British Isles (1858, 1861-65, 1866-67) were followed by one in America (1867-68). When he undertook another English tour of readings (1869-70), his health broke, and he died soon afterward, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. His grave is in Westminster Abbey.
Charles Dickens is one of the giants of English literature. He wrote from his own experience a great deal—the Marshalsea prison dominates Little Dorrit, and his father was at least partially the model for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. Although he was expert at journalistic reporting, he wrote nothing that was not transformed from actuality by his imagination. Sharp depiction of the eccentricities and characteristic traits of people was stretched into caricature, and for generations of readers the names of his characters—Mr. Pickwick, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Ebenezer Scrooge—have been household words.
His enormous warmth of feeling sometimes spilled into sentimental pathos, sometimes flowed as pure tragedy. Dickens was particularly successful at evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of London, and the customs of his day. He attacked the injustices of the law and social hypocrisy and evils, but after many of the ills he pictured had been cured he gained still more readers. Some critics complain of his disorderliness in structure and of his sentimentality, but none has attempted to deny his genius at revealing the very pulse of life.
See his letters ed. by M. House et al. (12 vol., 1965-2002). The old standard biography of Dickens is by his friend John Forster (3 vol., 1872-74; new ed. 1928, repr. 1966). See also biographies by P. Collins (1987), F. Kaplan (1988), P. Ackroyd (1990), and M. Slater (2009); studies by M. Engel (1959), I. Brown (1964 and 1970), A. Wilson (1970), A. E. Dyson (1971), J. Carey (1974), E. Johnson, (1986), and J. Smiley (2002); P. Collins, ed., Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971); P. Hobsbaum, A Reader's Guide to Charles Dickens (1973); M. and M. Hardwick, The Charles Dickens Encyclopedia (1973); N. Page, A Dickens Companion (1987); P. Ackroyd, Dickens' London (1988).
See E. L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vol., 1877-93); D. H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960, repr. 1970) and Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970).
See biography by W. D. Hamilton (1971).
See his Life, Letters and Writings, ed. by P. Fitzgerald (1895, repr. 1971); E. W. Marrs, Jr., ed., The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb (3 vol., 1975-78); biographies by A. Ainger (1901, repr. 1970), E. V. Lucas (1968), D. Cecil (1984), and B. Cornwall (2003); biography of Mary Anne Lamb by S. T. Hitchcock (2004); studies by E. Blunden (1954; 1933, repr. 1967), J. E. Riehl (1980), and G. Monsman (1984 and 2003).
See biography by M. Elwin (1931); study by W. Burns (1961).
See his Spiritual Autobiography, ed. and annotated by J. F. Six (tr. 1964); biography by M. L. Trouncer (1972).
See studies by N. V. Riasanovsky (1969), D. Zeldin (1969), and J. F. Beecher (1987).
See studies by M. Villiers (1965), N. Jussem-Wilson (1965), H. A. Schmitt (1967), and G. Hill (1984).
See his collected memoirs, A Fly in the Soup (2003); M. Hulse, Charles Simic in Conversation with Michael Hulse (2002); B. Weigl, ed., Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry (1996).
See biographies by K. M. Rowland (1898, repr. 1968), J. Gurn (1932), and E. H. Smith (1942, repr. 1971).
See his letters (tr. by S. Morini and F. Tuten, 1970), his intimate journal (tr. by C. Isherwood, 1947), and selected letters (tr. and ed. by L. B. and F. E. Hyslop, 1957); biography by E. Starkie (rev. ed. 1958), studies by J.-P. Sartre (1950, repr. 1972) and M. A. Ruff (1965).
See studies by L. Delteil (1928) and C. Dodgson (1931).
See K. Walter, ed., Co-operation and Charles Gide (1933).
See biography by M. Ewy (1961).
During World War I de Gaulle served with distinction until his capture in 1916. In The Army of the Future (1934, tr. 1941) he foresaw and futilely advocated for France the mechanized warfare by which Germany was to conquer France in 1940. In World War II he was promoted to brigadier general (1940) and became undersecretary of war in the cabinet of Premier Paul Reynaud.
De Gaulle opposed the Franco-German armistice and fled (June, 1940) to London, where he organized the Free French forces and rallied several French colonies to his movement. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a French military court. The Free French forces were successful in Syria, Madagascar, and N Africa. In June, 1943, de Gaulle became copresident, with Gen. Henri Honoré Giraud, of the newly formed French Committee of National Liberation at Algiers. He succeeded in forcing Giraud out of the committee, and in June, 1944, it was proclaimed the provisional government of France.
De Gaulle's government returned to Paris on Aug. 26 and was recognized by the principal Allies. He was unanimously elected provisional president of France in Nov., 1945, but he resigned in Jan., 1946, when it became obvious that his views favoring a strong executive would not be incorporated into the new constitution. Many of the rightist elements had gathered under the Gaullist banner, and he became (1947) head of a new party—Rassemblement du Peuple Français [Rally of the French People]—which claimed to speak for all Frenchmen and to be above factional strife but which, nevertheless, took part in subsequent elections. The party had some temporary electoral success, but in 1953 de Gaulle dissolved it and went into retirement.
In 1958, after the military and civilian revolt in Algeria had created a political crisis in France, he was considered the only leader of sufficient strength and stature to deal with the situation. He became premier with power to rule by decree for six months. During this time a new constitution, which strengthened the presidency, was drawn up (1958). The constitution also provided for the French Community, the first step toward resolving imperial problems. De Gaulle was inaugurated as president of the new Fifth Republic in Jan., 1959. He decided to allow Algeria self-determination. This decision led to several revolts in Algeria by French colonists who opposed independence. Finally in 1962 an agreement was reached that provided for Algerian independence.
In domestic affairs de Gaulle attempted to restore French national finances by devaluing the franc and creating a new franc worth 100 old francs. Much of de Gaulle's program consisted of an attempt to raise France to its former world stature. He argued for French parity with the United States in NATO decisions and promoted French development of atomic weapons. In 1966, he withdrew French troops from NATO and ordered the withdrawal of NATO military installations from France by Apr., 1967.
De Gaulle was reelected to a second seven-year term in 1965. Although he rejected limitations on French sovereignty, he supported participation in the Common Market but strongly opposed British membership in it. He fostered ties with West Germany and established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. In May, 1968, student demonstrations protesting French political and educational systems were followed by huge workers' strikes that nearly toppled the Gaullist government. Nevertheless, in elections held in June, the Gaullists were returned to power. In 1969, after being defeated in a referendum on constitutional reform, de Gaulle resigned as president.
See De Gaulle's War Memoirs (tr., 3 vol., 1955-60; repr. 1984) and Memoirs of Hope (tr. 1972); biographies by P. Masson (1971), B. Crozier (1973), D. Cook (1984), and C. Williams (1995); A. Werth, The De Gaulle Revolution (1960), P. M. Williams and M. Harrison, De Gaulle's Republic (1960), R. Aron, An Explanation of De Gaulle (1965), J. Hess, The Case for De Gaulle (1968), A. Hartley, Gaullism (1971), P. Alexandre, The Duel: De Gaulle and Pompidou (1972), J. Lacouture, De Gaulle (2 vol., 1990-92).
See biography by E. Farnham (1971) and A. L. Eiseman (1986).
In 1981 he married Lady Diana Frances Spencer (see Diana, princess of Wales). Their children, next in line to succeed him, are Prince William (b. 1982) and Prince Henry (b. 1984). Following the separation of Charles and Diana in 1992, the deterioration of their personal relationship became the subject of intense, sometimes lurid, media coverage. By the time of their divorce (1996) and her death (Aug., 1997) in a Paris car crash, the sympathies of the British public appeared deeply divided between Charles and Diana.
Charles has been an outspoken critic of contemporary architecture and has sought to bring Britain's architectural heritage to the attention of the nation. He wrote A Vision of Britain (1989), which became a television documentary. He is also an advocate for inner-city reform and environmental issues. In 2005 he married Camilla Parker Bowles, who had long been his mistress; she became the duchess of Cornwall.
See F. L. Petre, Napoleon and the Archduke Charles (1908).
See his autobiography (1978); biographies by D. Ritz (1978) and M. Lydon (1999).
See W. Hughes, ed., Life and Letters of the Rev. Thomas Charles (1881).
See W. Walker, Ten New England Leaders (1901, repr. 1969).
See bibliography by S. F. Bell (1971); study by H. Nelson (1972).
See Letters and Memories (ed. by his wife, 2 vol., 1877, repr. 1973); biographies by M. F. Thorp (1937, repr. 1969), U. Pope-Hennessy (1948, repr. 1973), and B. Colloms (1975); study by A. J. Hartley (1981); S. Harris, Charles Kingsley: A Reference Book (1981).
In his innovative compositions he has explored and expanded electronic music and serial music; Wuorinen explains his approach in the treatise Simple Composition (1979, repr. 1994). He has written more than 200 compositions—including works for electronic media alone and with traditional instruments—for orchestra, chamber group, ballet, opera, chorus, and soloists. Among his best known pieces are Time's Encomium (1969), an electronic piece that won him the Pulitzer Prize; Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky (1975), based on Stravinsky's last sketches; Bamboula Squared (1984), for orchestra and computer-generated sound; the Dante Trilogy (1993-96), orchestral scores written for the New York City Ballet; and the opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2005), adapted from the novel by Salman Rushdie.
See bio-bibliography by R. D. Burbank (1993).
See H. Kirker, The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch (1969).
See The Drawings of Charles Burchfield with text by the artist (1968); Charles Burchfield's Journals (ed. by J. B. Townsend, 1992); biography by J. Baur (1982).
See biographies by P. A. Scholes (1848) and R. H. Lonsdale (1965).
See biography by L. R. Harley (1900).
See his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (1971); biographies by B. Priestly (1982) and G. Santoro (2000).
See biography by R. U. Harris (1937).
See biography by E. A. Fitzpatrick (1944).
See biographies by E. A. Perry (1891) and W. W. Appleton (1960).
See his works (ed. by D. Grant, 1956); study by W. C. Brown (1953).
See C. Troyen and T. E. Stebbins, Jr., Charles Sheeler (2 vol., 1987).
After having completely encircled the globe (his was the last all-sail naval mission to do so), Wilkes returned to New York in June, 1842. In four years at sea he had logged some 87,000 miles and lost two ships and 28 men. His Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (5 vol. and an atlas) appeared in 1844. He edited the scientific reports of the expedition (20 vol. and 11 atlases, 1844-74) and was the author of Vol. XI (Meteorology) and Vol. XIII (Hydrography). Moreover, the specimens and artifacts brought back by expedition scientists ultimately formed the foundation for the Smithsonian Institution collection.
Despite his accomplishments, Wilkes acquired a reputation as an arrogant, cruel, and capricious leader. The impetuosity of his nature, for which he was twice court-martialed, was demonstrated when early in the Civil War, as commander of the San Jacinto, he stopped the British mail ship Trent and, contrary to all regulations, forcibly removed Confederate commissioners John Slidell and James M. Mason. The incident almost involved the Union in a war with England (see Trent Affair). Promoted to the rank of commodore in 1862, he commanded a squadron in the West Indies.
See biography by D. Henderson (1953, repr. 1971); W. Bixby, The Forgotten Voyage of Charles Wilkes (1966); R. Silverberg, Stormy Voyager (1968); A. Gurney, The Race to the White Continent (2000); N. Philbrick, Sea of Glory (2003).
See biographies by G. Farwell (1963) and M. Langley (1969).
See biography by J. E. Haley (1949).
See studies by R. F. Wolf (1939) and A. C. Regli (1941).
His son Charles Goodyear, 1833-96, b. Germantown, Pa., assisted him in the manufacturing and marketing of rubber articles. He later turned to shoe manufacturing, being one of the first to see the application of Howe's sewing machine to the making of shoes. He organized in 1871 the Goodyear Boot & Shoe Machinery Company of New York to manufacture machines. He was only partially successful until the consolidation in 1880 with Gordon McKay, his chief competitor.
See W. L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case (1965); D. Tribe, President Charles Bradlaugh, M. P. (1971).
See his Essays before a Sonata (new ed. 1962) and his Memos, ed. by J. E. Kirkpatrick (1972); biography by H. and S. Cowell (rev. ed. 1969); V. Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered (1974); R. S. Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind (1974); H. W. Hitchcock, Ives (1977).
See his journal, ed. by T. Jackson (1849); J. R. Tyson, Charles Wesley on Sanctification: A Biographical and Theological Study (1986) and Charles Wesley: A Reader (1989).
See biography by F. W. Blackmar (1901, repr. 1971).
See C. C. Hall, The Lords Baltimore and the Maryland Palatinate (1902).
In retirement at Blois, he devoted the rest of his life to writing verse and to the society of literary men. Among his poems, which are remarkable for their polish and charm, is the rondeau, "Le temps a laissié son manteau" [the season has shed its cloak]. There are translations of his poems by Andrew Lang, W. E. Henley, and Ezra Pound. Charles's son was King Louis XII.
See biography by E. McLeod (1970).
See his I Am a Conductor (1954, tr. 1955).
See biographies by M. Moseley (1970) and D. Halacy (1970).
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Charles de Gaulle, 1967.
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Charles Frederick Worth, detail of an engraving
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(born March 3, 1793, London, Eng.—died April 27, 1873, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) English actor-manager. He made his debut in 1810, and by 1820 he was famous for his performances as Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth. As theatre manager of London's Covent Garden (1837–39) and Drury Lane (1841–43), he introduced reforms such as full rehearsals, historically accurate costumes and sets, and a reversion to the original Shakespeare texts. He toured the U.S. in 1826, 1843, and 1848–49; his last tour ended with the Astor Place riot, caused by partisans of Edwin Forrest. He retired from the stage in 1851. His diary provides a view of 19th-century theatrical life.
Learn more about Macready, William (Charles) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born July 22, 1901, Lincoln, Neb., U.S.—died July 15, 1975, New York, N.Y.) U.S. modern dancer, teacher, and choreographer. He studied at the Denishawn school and was a member of its company in the 1920s. In 1928 he cofounded with Doris Humphrey the Humphrey-Weidman school and dance company, for which he choreographed many works. His dances, often comic and satiric, employed an abstract, rhythmic pantomime. In 1945 he established his own school, and in 1948 he founded the Theatre Dance Company, for which he choreographed his major work, Fables for Our Time. He continued to teach, choreograph, and dance into the 1970s.
Learn more about Weidman, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Dec. 28, 1719, Dijon, France—died Feb. 13, 1787, Versailles) French statesman. As ambassador to Ottoman Turkey (1754–68), he ably defended French policies during the Seven Years' War. As Louis XVI's minister of foreign affairs (1774–87), he advocated French financial and military support for the colonists in the American Revolution, concluded an alliance with them (1778), and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1783). He also worked to establish a stable balance of power in Europe by mediating the peace in the War of the Bavarian Succession.
Learn more about Vergennes, Charles Gravier, count de with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born June 25, 1925, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. architect. He studied at Princeton University and in Rome at the American Academy. After working with Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, he formed a partnership with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and John Rauch. His philosophy, set forth in the influential books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), called for openness to the multiple influences of historical tradition, ordinary commercial architecture, and Pop art. He had such a profound impact on younger architects who were beginning to find similar constraints and limitations in the Modernist architectural aesthetic, that he became the unofficial dean of the postmodern movement in architecture. His buildings often exhibit ironic humour. Important commissions include buildings for Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, the Seattle Art Museum (1985–91), and the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery (1986–91). He won the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Learn more about Venturi, Robert (Charles) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born July 28, 1915, Greenville, S.C., U.S.) U.S. physicist. He studied at Furman University, Duke University, and the California Institute of Technology and worked for Bell Labs before joining the faculty of Columbia University (1948). In the early 1950s he and his students constructed the first maser and showed that a similar device producing visible light was also possible. For his role in the invention of the maser and later the laser, he shared a 1964 Nobel Prize with Aleksandr M. Prokhorov (b. 1916) and Nikolay G. Basov (b. 1922).
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Alexis de Tocqueville, detail of an oil painting by T. Chassériau; in the Versailles Museum.
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Algernon Charles Swinburne, watercolour by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1862; in the Fitzwilliam Museum, elipsis
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Charles Sumner
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Mrs. Richard Yates, oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1793–94; in the National Gallery elipsis
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Charles Steinmetz.
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(born April 4, 1823, Lenthe, Prussia—died Nov. 19, 1883, London, Eng.) German-born British engineer and inventor. He immigrated to Britain in 1844. In 1861 he patented the open-hearth furnace (see open-hearth process), which was soon being widely used in steelmaking and eventually replaced the earlier Bessemer process. He also made a reputation and a fortune in the steel cable and telegraph industries and was a principal in the company that laid the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (1866). His three brothers were also eminent engineers and industrialists (see Siemens AG).
Learn more about Siemens, Sir (Charles) William with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Nov. 27, 1857, London, Eng.—died March 4, 1952, Eastbourne, Sussex) English physiologist. By studying animals whose cerebral cortexes had been removed, he showed that reflexes are integrated activities of the total organism, not based on isolated “reflex arcs.” Sherrington's law states that when one set of muscles is stimulated, muscles opposing their action are inhibited. He showed that the role of proprioception in reflexes that maintain upright posture against gravity is independent of cerebral function and skin sensation. His work influenced the development of brain surgery and treatment of nervous disorders, and he coined the terms neuron and synapse. His classic work is The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906). In 1932 he shared a Nobel Prize with Edgar Adrian (1889–1977).
Learn more about Sherrington, Sir Charles Scott with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Jan. 10, 1860, Douglas, N.B.—died Nov. 26, 1943, Toronto, Ont., Can.) Canadian poet. At first a teacher and editor, he became a journalist in New York City and lived in London before settling in Toronto. His best-known poems are simple descriptive lyrics about the scenery and rural life of Nova Scotia and his native New Brunswick. He published some 12 verse volumes, including In Divers Tones (1887) and The Vagrant of Time (1927). His prose includes short stories that display his intimate knowledge of the Canadian woods, including Earth's Enigmas (1896) and Red Fox (1905). He is remembered as the first writer to express national feeling after the confederation of 1867.
Learn more about Roberts, Sir Charles G(eorge) D(ouglas) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born June 13, 1854, London, Eng.—died Feb. 11, 1931, Kingston Harbour, Jam.) British mechanical engineer. He began work at the Armstrong engineering works in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1877 and formed his own company to manufacture turbines and other heavy machinery in 1889. He developed the multiple-stage turbine in 1884 and had introduced it in power plants to generate electricity by 1891. Modern steam and nuclear power plants still use turbines of this type to turn their generators. He demonstrated his marine turbine in Turbinia, a vessel that attained a speed of over 34 knots in 1897; Parsons turbines made high-speed ocean liners possible.
Learn more about Parsons, Sir Charles Algernon with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Aug. 31, 1913, Oldland Common, Gloucestershire, Eng.) British radio astronomer. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, worked for the Air Ministry during World War II, and lectured at the University of Manchester after the war. He built the first giant radio telescope (1957) at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester; with a bowl diameter of 250 ft (76 m), the instrument is used for astronomical research and spacecraft tracking and communication.
Learn more about Lovell, Sir (Alfred Charles) Bernard with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos.) Yugoslavian-born U.S. poet. When he was 15 years old, he and his mother moved to Paris; a year later they joined his father in the U.S. After graduating from New York University, he translated Yugoslavian poetry into English. His first volume of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967), was recognized for its lively, surrealistic imagery; the collection The World Doesn't End (1989) won a Pulitzer Prize. He also published volumes in prose, including the memoir A Fly in the Soup (2000). He was named U.S. poet laureate in 2007.
Learn more about Simic, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born April 4, 1823, Lenthe, Prussia—died Nov. 19, 1883, London, Eng.) German-born British engineer and inventor. He immigrated to Britain in 1844. In 1861 he patented the open-hearth furnace (see open-hearth process), which was soon being widely used in steelmaking and eventually replaced the earlier Bessemer process. He also made a reputation and a fortune in the steel cable and telegraph industries and was a principal in the company that laid the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (1866). His three brothers were also eminent engineers and industrialists (see Siemens AG).
Learn more about Siemens, Sir (Charles) William with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Nov. 27, 1857, London, Eng.—died March 4, 1952, Eastbourne, Sussex) English physiologist. By studying animals whose cerebral cortexes had been removed, he showed that reflexes are integrated activities of the total organism, not based on isolated “reflex arcs.” Sherrington's law states that when one set of muscles is stimulated, muscles opposing their action are inhibited. He showed that the role of proprioception in reflexes that maintain upright posture against gravity is independent of cerebral function and skin sensation. His work influenced the development of brain surgery and treatment of nervous disorders, and he coined the terms neuron and synapse. His classic work is The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906). In 1932 he shared a Nobel Prize with Edgar Adrian (1889–1977).
Learn more about Sherrington, Sir Charles Scott with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born July 16, 1883, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died May 7, 1965, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.) U.S. painter and photographer. Educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he initially earned a living as a photographer. His acclaimed series of photographs of the Ford automobile plant at River Rouge, Mich. (1927), was followed by a series on Chartres Cathedral (1929). In his paintings, early Cubist influences led to the Precisionism of his maturity. He treated industrial and architectural subjects in an abstract-realist style, emphasizing their formal qualities, as in his painting Rolling Power (1939), which revealed the abstract power of a locomotive's driving wheels.
Learn more about Sheeler, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Feb. 18, 1862, Williamsburg, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 18, 1939, New York, N.Y.) U.S. entrepreneur and steel-industry pioneer. He joined Andrew Carnegie's steelworks at Braddock, Pa., as a labourer and rose swiftly in the Carnegie empire. In 1892 Carnegie delegated to Schwab the task of returning the plant in Homestead, Pa., to normal production after the bloody Homestead Strike. His success in improving labour relations and increasing production led to his appointment as president of Carnegie Steel Co. in 1897 at the age of 35. Schwab proposed the merger of the competing steel companies that would create the U.S. Steel Corp., and he became its first president in 1901. He resigned in 1903 to devote himself to the Bethlehem Steel Corp., which he built into one of the nation's largest steel producers of its time.
Learn more about Schwab, Charles M(ichael) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Feb. 16, 1852, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 31, 1916, Pampa, Texas) U.S. religious leader who founded the International Bible Students Association, the forerunner of the Jehovah's Witnesses. He was raised in the Congregational church but rejected its teachings, unable to reconcile God's mercy with the idea of hell. Influenced by the Adventists, he adopted a doctrine of millennialism. He founded the International Bible Students Association in 1872 (renamed Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931) and taught that the final days would come in 1914 and that Christ's kingdom on earth would begin after a war between capitalism and socialism. In 1884 he founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, today one of the world's largest publishers. His books, pamphlets, and periodicals were widely circulated, and he won many converts despite the apparent failure of his apocalyptic prediction.
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(born Feb. 9, 1891, Richmond, Surrey, Eng.—died May 19, 1958, Santa Barbara, Calif., U.S.) British-U.S. film actor. He began a stage and film career in England then moved in 1920 to the U.S., where he first won notice in The White Sister (1923). A romantic leading man, he appeared in other silent films such as Beau Geste (1926), and he easily made the transition to sound movies with his cultivated, expressive voice. His most notable films include Arrowsmith (1931), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937), If I Were King (1938), Random Harvest (1942), and A Double Life (1947, Academy Award).
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(born Jan. 11, 1924, Dijon, Fr.) French-born U.S. physiologist. He and his colleagues discovered, isolated, and synthesized hypothalamic hormones that regulate thyroid activity, cause the pituitary to release growth hormone, and regulate the activities of the pituitary and the pancreas. He shared a 1977 Nobel Prize with Andrew V. Schally and Rosalyn Yalow. Guillemin is also known for his discovery of endorphins.
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(born Jan. 10, 1860, Douglas, N.B.—died Nov. 26, 1943, Toronto, Ont., Can.) Canadian poet. At first a teacher and editor, he became a journalist in New York City and lived in London before settling in Toronto. His best-known poems are simple descriptive lyrics about the scenery and rural life of Nova Scotia and his native New Brunswick. He published some 12 verse volumes, including In Divers Tones (1887) and The Vagrant of Time (1927). His prose includes short stories that display his intimate knowledge of the Canadian woods, including Earth's Enigmas (1896) and Red Fox (1905). He is remembered as the first writer to express national feeling after the confederation of 1867.
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(born June 25, 1925, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. architect. He studied at Princeton University and in Rome at the American Academy. After working with Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, he formed a partnership with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and John Rauch. His philosophy, set forth in the influential books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), called for openness to the multiple influences of historical tradition, ordinary commercial architecture, and Pop art. He had such a profound impact on younger architects who were beginning to find similar constraints and limitations in the Modernist architectural aesthetic, that he became the unofficial dean of the postmodern movement in architecture. His buildings often exhibit ironic humour. Important commissions include buildings for Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, the Seattle Art Museum (1985–91), and the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery (1986–91). He won the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
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(born Aug. 6, 1917, Bridgeport, Conn., U.S.—died July 1, 1997, Santa Barbara county, Calif.) U.S. film actor. Expelled from high school in New York City, he spent his teenage years wandering the country and working odd jobs. After joining an acting company in California, he made his screen debut in 1943, acting in several Hopalong Cassidy westerns. He won praise for his role in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). With his trademark sleepy-eyed, tough-guy appearance, he usually played loners and villains, in movies (many of them B movies that have grown in critical esteem over time) such as Out of the Past (1947), The Lusty Men (1952), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Thunder Road (1958), Cape Fear (1962), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). In his later years, he starred in the television miniseries Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988–89).
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(born Sept. 15, 1889, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 21, 1945, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. drama critic, actor, and humorist. Benchley graduated from Harvard University and joined the staff of Life magazine in 1920. A regular member of the Algonquin Round Table, he was drama critic for The New Yorker 1929–40, for which he also wrote “The Wayward Press” column under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes. He had bit parts in many feature films, but he is best known for more than 40 short subjects, including How to Sleep (1934, Academy Award). His writing was warmly humorous, his satire sharp but not cruel.
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(born Aug. 18, 1937, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) U.S. film actor and director. He made his Broadway debut in 1959 and won acclaim in Barefoot in the Park (1963; film, 1967). The blond, appealing Redford began acting in films in the mid-1960s. He appeared with Paul Newman in the hits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) and also starred in The Candidate (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), All the President's Men (1976), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Indecent Proposal (1993). His directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980, Academy Award), was followed by The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). He received an honorary Academy Award in 2001. In 1980 he founded the Sundance Institute to sponsor young filmmakers' works, and by the 1990s its film festival was the major showcase for U.S. independent films.
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(born June 8, 1814, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died April 11, 1884, London) English novelist and dramatist. Though trained in law and an administrator at Oxford University, he put much of his time and resources into writing and staging his melodramatic plays. His novels expose, with passionate indignation, the social injustices of his times. He is best remembered for the historical romance The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). His other novels include It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), attacking prison conditions; Hard Cash (1863), on the abuse of mental patients; and Put Yourself in His Place (1870), about terrorism by trade unionists.
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(born , Sept. 27, 1886, Berea, Ohio, U.S.—died Feb. 18, 1975, Phoenix, Ariz.) U.S. educator and political adviser. He taught political science at Columbia University from 1923 to 1954. In the 1920s he prepared studies of criminal justice in a number of cities for New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was preparing for his 1932 presidential campaign, Moley formed the Brain Trust to advise him on national issues. Moley wrote many of Roosevelt's campaign speeches and coined the term New Deal. From 1937 to 1968 he was a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine.
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(born Sept. 23, 1930, Albany, Ga., U.S.—died June 10, 2004, Beverly Hills, Calif.) U.S. pianist, singer, and songwriter. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., where he began his musical career at age 5 in a neighbourhood café. By age 7 he had completely lost his sight. He learned to write scores in Braille. Orphaned at 15, he left school to play professionally. He recorded “Mess Around” and “It Should've Been Me” in 1952–53, and his arrangement for Guitar Slim's “The Things That I Used to Do” became a million-seller. Combining blues and gospel music influences, a distinctive raspy voice, and liquid phrasing, Charles later had hits with “What'd I Say,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Hit the Road, Jack.” His Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), marking unusual territory for a black performer, sold more than a million copies. He received 13 Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 1987. Charles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
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(born Feb. 25, 1746, Charleston, S.C.—died Aug. 16, 1825, Charleston, S.C., U.S.) U.S. soldier, statesman, and diplomat. A cousin of Charles Pinckney and the brother of Thomas Pinckney, he was an aide to George Washington in the American Revolution, commanded at Savannah, Ga., and was promoted to brigadier general in 1783. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Appointed minister to France (1796), he was involved in negotiations that ended in the XYZ Affair; when one of the group of French negotiators suggested that the U.S. representatives offer a gift in order to gain a peace treaty, Pinckney is said to have replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence!” He was the unsuccessful Federalist candidate for vice president in 1800 and for president in 1804 and 1808.
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(born Oct. 26, 1757, Charleston, S.C.—died Oct. 29, 1824, Charleston, S.C., U.S.) U.S. statesman. A cousin of Charles C. Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney, he fought in the American Revolution. From 1784 to 1787 he served in the Continental Congress, where he was instrumental in calling for the Constitutional Convention. As a delegate to the convention from South Carolina, he proposed numerous provisions that were incorporated in the final draft of the Constitution of the United States. He helped write the South Carolina constitution and was also governor of the state (1789–92, 1796–98, 1806–08). He served in the U.S. Senate from 1798 to 1801 and as minister to Spain from 1801 to 1805.
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(born Jan. 12, 1628, Paris, France—died May 15/16, 1703, Paris) French poet, prose writer, and storyteller. Perrault began to win a literary reputation circa 1660 with light verse and love poetry. He is best remembered for his collection of charming fairy stories written to amuse his children, Contes de ma mère l'oye, or Tales of Mother Goose (1697; see Mother Goose). He spent the rest of his life promoting the study of literature and the arts. A leading member of the Académie Française, he was involved in a famous controversy with Nicholas Boileau on the relative merits of ancient and modern literature; his support for the modern was of landmark significance in the revolt against the constraints of prevailing tradition.
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(born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.—died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.) U.S. scientist, logician, and philosopher. He was the son of the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce (1809–80). After attending Harvard University he spent 30 years with the U.S. Coast Guard Survey (1861–91). As a scientist, he is noted for his contributions to the theory of probability, the study of gravity, and the logic of scientific methodology. He eventually abandoned the physical sciences to study logic, which in its widest sense he identified with semiotics. He lectured on logic at Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1894, then spent the rest of his life writing in seclusion. He is regarded as the founder of pragmatism. Though he made eminent contributions to deductive logic, he was a student primarily of “the logic of science”—i.e., of induction and of “retroduction,” or “abduction,” the forming and accepting on probation of a hypothesis in order to explain surprising facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish induction and abduction as permanent branches of logic.
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(born April 15, 1741, Queen Anne's county, Md.—died Feb. 22, 1827, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. painter, inventor, and naturalist. He began his career by exchanging a saddle for painting lessons. He later went to London to study with Benjamin West. On his return he became the preeminent portrait painter of the middle colonies. He damaged his professional career by entering enthusiastically into the revolutionary movement. In 1786 he founded an institution in Philadelphia for the study of natural law and display of natural history and technological objects; the Peale Museum, the first major U.S. museum, was widely imitated by other museums of the period and later by P.T. Barnum. Peale is best remembered for his portraits of the leading figures of the American Revolution.
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(born Aug. 6, 1868, Villeneuve-sur-Fère, France—died Feb. 23, 1955, Paris) French poet, playwright, and diplomat. He converted to Catholicism at age 18. His brilliant diplomatic career began in 1892, and he eventually served as ambassador to Japan (1921–27) and the U.S. (1927–33). At the same time he pursued a literary career, expressing in poetry and drama his conception of the grand design of creation. He reached his largest audience through plays such as Break of Noon (1906), The Hostage (1911), Tidings Brought to Mary (1912), and his masterpiece, The Satin Slipper (1929); recurring themes in these works are human and divine love and the search for salvation. He wrote the librettos for Darius Milhaud's opera Christopher Columbus (1930) and Arthur Honegger's oratorio Joan of Arc (1938). His best-known poetic work is the confessional Five Great Odes (1910).
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(born June 13, 1854, London, Eng.—died Feb. 11, 1931, Kingston Harbour, Jam.) British mechanical engineer. He began work at the Armstrong engineering works in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1877 and formed his own company to manufacture turbines and other heavy machinery in 1889. He developed the multiple-stage turbine in 1884 and had introduced it in power plants to generate electricity by 1891. Modern steam and nuclear power plants still use turbines of this type to turn their generators. He demonstrated his marine turbine in Turbinia, a vessel that attained a speed of over 34 knots in 1897; Parsons turbines made high-speed ocean liners possible.
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(born June 27, 1846, Avondale, County Wicklow, Ire.—died Oct. 6, 1891, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.) Irish nationalist leader. After an education at the University of Cambridge, he returned to Ireland and served in the British Parliament (1875–91), introducing obstructionist legislative tactics to call attention to Ireland's needs. In 1877 he became president of the Home Rule Confederation. He was jailed for making violent speeches against the new land act (1881–82), then released to curb an increase in terrorist acts. Reaction against the Phoenix Park murders enabled him to unite factions in Ireland to win support for parliamentary measures, such as William E. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals. He remained popular in Ireland until he was named in the divorce suit of his mistress, Katherine O'Shea (1890).
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Olivier Messiaen.
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Musset, oil painting by Charles Landelle; in the Louvre, Paris
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(born , Sept. 27, 1886, Berea, Ohio, U.S.—died Feb. 18, 1975, Phoenix, Ariz.) U.S. educator and political adviser. He taught political science at Columbia University from 1923 to 1954. In the 1920s he prepared studies of criminal justice in a number of cities for New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was preparing for his 1932 presidential campaign, Moley formed the Brain Trust to advise him on national issues. Moley wrote many of Roosevelt's campaign speeches and coined the term New Deal. From 1937 to 1968 he was a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine.
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(born Aug. 6, 1917, Bridgeport, Conn., U.S.—died July 1, 1997, Santa Barbara county, Calif.) U.S. film actor. Expelled from high school in New York City, he spent his teenage years wandering the country and working odd jobs. After joining an acting company in California, he made his screen debut in 1943, acting in several Hopalong Cassidy westerns. He won praise for his role in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). With his trademark sleepy-eyed, tough-guy appearance, he usually played loners and villains, in movies (many of them B movies that have grown in critical esteem over time) such as Out of the Past (1947), The Lusty Men (1952), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Thunder Road (1958), Cape Fear (1962), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). In his later years, he starred in the television miniseries Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988–89).
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(born April 22, 1922, Nogales, Ariz., U.S.—died Jan. 5, 1979, Cuernavaca, Mex.) U.S. jazz composer, bassist, and bandleader. Mingus played in the groups of Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and Red Norvo, ultimately working with many of the innovators of bebop. In 1953 he organized the Jazz Workshop ensemble, which played a spirited combination of loosely arranged passages and improvisation, incorporating elements of the blues and free jazz. As a pioneering bandleader and virtuoso bassist, Mingus remained an uncompromising and innovative force in jazz for the rest of his career. He was one of the most important and colourful figures in modern jazz.
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Olivier Messiaen.
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(born Aug. 24, 1847, Chester County, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 14, 1909, St. James, Long Island, N.Y.) U.S. architect. He was educated at Harvard University and in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1879 he joined William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White to found McKim, Mead & White, the most successful U.S. architectural firm of its time. Until 1887 the firm excelled at Shingle style residences. In later years it championed the formal Renaissance tradition and its Classical antecedents, helping to inspire a Neoclassical revival. Among the widely admired examples of McKim's formal planning are the Boston Public Library (1887), the Columbia University Library (1893), the building program of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893, with Daniel H. Burnham and Richard Morris Hunt), and in New York City the Morgan Library (1903) and the magnificent Pennsylvania Railway Station (1904–10; demolished 1963).
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(born Feb. 20, 1887, Toronto, Ont., Can.—died Dec. 30, 1967, London, Eng.) Canadian administrator, first Canadian governor-general of Canada (1952–59). He taught history at the University of Toronto from 1913 to 1915. During World War I he served as associate secretary of the cabinet war committee. After the war he operated a farm-machinery business until 1925. Active in Liberal Party politics, he served in the cabinet of W.L. Mackenzie King (1925) and was later Canada's first minister to the U.S. (1926–30) and high commissioner for Canada in Britain (1935–46). After serving as chancellor of the University of Toronto (1947–52), he was named governor-general. His brother was the actor Raymond Massey (1896–1983).
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(born March 3, 1793, London, Eng.—died April 27, 1873, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) English actor-manager. He made his debut in 1810, and by 1820 he was famous for his performances as Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth. As theatre manager of London's Covent Garden (1837–39) and Drury Lane (1841–43), he introduced reforms such as full rehearsals, historically accurate costumes and sets, and a reversion to the original Shakespeare texts. He toured the U.S. in 1826, 1843, and 1848–49; his last tour ended with the Astor Place riot, caused by partisans of Edwin Forrest. He retired from the stage in 1851. His diary provides a view of 19th-century theatrical life.
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(born June 7, 1868, Glasgow, Scot.—died Dec. 10, 1928, London, Eng.) Scottish architect, furniture designer, and artist. A giant of the Arts and Crafts Movement, he is especially revered for his glass-and-stone studio building at the Glasgow School of Art (1896–1909), where he had attended classes. In the 1890s he achieved an international reputation creating unorthodox posters, craftwork, and furniture. Considered Britain's first designer of true Art Nouveau architecture, he produced work of an unrivaled lightness, elegance, and originality, as exemplified by four remarkable tearooms he designed in Glasgow (1896–1904). By 1914 he was dedicating all his energies to watercolour painting. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in his work and the manufacture of reproductions of his chairs and settees, which were characterized by starkly simple geometric lines.
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(born Aug. 31, 1913, Oldland Common, Gloucestershire, Eng.) British radio astronomer. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, worked for the Air Ministry during World War II, and lectured at the University of Manchester after the war. He built the first giant radio telescope (1957) at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester; with a bowl diameter of 250 ft (76 m), the instrument is used for astronomical research and spacecraft tracking and communication.
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Charles A. Lindbergh in front of his airplane Spirit of St. Louis, 1927.
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(born Feb. 24, 1619, Paris, France—died Feb. 12, 1690, Paris) French painter and designer. After study in Paris and Rome, he received large decorative and religious commissions that made his reputation. Possessing extraordinary organizational as well as technical skills, as the first painter to Louis XIV he created or supervised the production of most of the paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects commissioned by the French government for three decades, notably for the Palace of Versailles. As director of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and organizer of the French Academy at Rome, he was instrumental in establishing the characteristic homogeneity of French art in the 17th century.
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(born July 1, 1899, Scarborough, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Dec. 15, 1962, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) British actor. He made his London stage debut in 1926 and acted in plays such as The Government Inspector, Medea, and Payment Deferred, in which he made his New York debut in 1931. He appeared in movies from 1929 and earned international acclaim in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933, Academy Award). With his bulky frame and ordinary face Laughton defied Hollywood typecasting and emerged as one of the most versatile performers of his generation. He played a wide range of character roles in films such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Advise and Consent (1962). He directed the memorable The Night of the Hunter (1955).
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(born Feb. 10, 1775, London, Eng.—died Dec. 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex) English essayist and critic. Lamb was employed as a clerk at East India House (headquarters for the East India Company) from 1792 to 1825. From 1796 he was guardian of his sister, the writer Mary Lamb (1764–1847), who, in a fit of madness (which proved recurrent), had killed their mother. He is best known for the often autobiographical essays he wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine, collected in Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Among the greatest of English letter writers, he included some of his most perceptive literary criticism, often in the form of marginalia, in letters. He collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespear (1807), a highly popular retelling of the plays for children.
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(born June 23, 1894, Hoboken, N.J., U.S.—died Aug. 25, 1956, Bloomington, Ind.) U.S. zoologist and expert on human sexual behaviour. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1920, he taught zoology at Indiana University, where he became the founder-director, in 1942, of the university's Institute for Sex Research (renamed the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Inc., in 1981). His inquiries into human sexuality led him to publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). These reports, based on 18,500 personal interviews, received extraordinary publicity for their conclusions about contemporary sexual mores and behaviour. Kinsey's methodologies and statistical samplings, however, have been highly questioned and criticized in recent years.
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(born June 12, 1819, Holne Vicarage, Devon, Eng.—died Jan. 23, 1875, Eversley, Hampshire) English clergyman and novelist. After studies at Cambridge, he became a parish priest and later chaplain to Queen Victoria, professor of modern history at Cambridge, and canon of Westminster. An enthusiastic advocate of Christian socialism, he published several novels about social problems before writing the very successful historical novels Hypatia (1853), Westward Ho! (1855), and Hereward the Wake (1866). Fearing the Anglican church's trend in the direction of Catholicism, he engaged in a famous controversy with John Henry Newman. His wholehearted acceptance of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution inspired his popular children's book The Water-Babies (1863).
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(born Sept. 1, 1878, Chichester, Sussex, Eng.—died Feb. 10, 1966, Falmouth, Cornwall) British military theoretician and historian. He served as chief of staff of the British tank corps in World War I. He planned the surprise attack of 381 tanks at the Battle of Cambrai (Nov. 20, 1917), the first massed tank assault in history. After the war he launched a crusade for the mechanization and modernization of the British army. His emphasis on the armoured offensive met with resistance among English military tacticians, but his teachings were largely vindicated in World War II. His works include Tanks in the Great War (1920), Machine Warfare (1942), and A Military History of the Western World (1954–56).
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(born April 11, 1862, Glens Falls, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 27, 1948, Osterville, Mass.) U.S. jurist and statesman. He became prominent in 1905 as counsel to New York legislative committees investigating abuses in the life insurance and utilities industries. His two terms as governor of New York (1906–10) were marked by extensive reform. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1910 but resigned in 1916 to run as the Republican presidential candidate. After losing the election to Woodrow Wilson in a close race, he returned to his law practice. As secretary of state (1921–25), he planned and chaired the Washington Conference (1921–22). He served as a member of the Hague Tribunal (1926–30) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (1928–30) before being appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1930 by Pres. Herbert Hoover. He led the court through the great controversies arising out the New Deal legislation of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt. Although generally favouring the exercise of government power, he spoke for the court in invalidating (in
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(born Jan. 11, 1924, Dijon, Fr.) French-born U.S. physiologist. He and his colleagues discovered, isolated, and synthesized hypothalamic hormones that regulate thyroid activity, cause the pituitary to release growth hormone, and regulate the activities of the pituitary and the pancreas. He shared a 1977 Nobel Prize with Andrew V. Schally and Rosalyn Yalow. Guillemin is also known for his discovery of endorphins.
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(born Sept. 17, 1884, Elmira, N.Y., U.S.—died April 8, 1920, New York City) U.S. composer. He studied music in Berlin with Engelbert Humperdinck and others, then returned and taught at a boys' school in Tarrytown, N.Y., for the rest of his short life. His early works reflect German Romanticism, but his mature style combined Impressionism and orientalism. His principal works are for piano, though some were later orchestrated: The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan (1912), a piano sonata (circa 1912), and Roman Sketches (including “The White Peacock”) (1915).
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(born March 4, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died April 3, 1991, Encino, Calif.) U.S. contract bridge authority. Goren learned bridge while a law student at McGill University. His innovative system of point-count bidding and his repeated successes in tournaments made him one of the world's most famous and influential players. His several popular books include the widely translated Goren's Bridge Complete (1963).
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(born Sept. 13, 1860, Indian Lands, Glengarry county, Ont., Can.—died Oct. 31, 1937, Winnipeg, Man.) Canadian novelist. Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1890, Connor became a missionary to mining and lumber camps in the Canadian Rocky Mountains; this experience and memories of his childhood in Glengarry, Ont., provided material for his novels, including The Sky Pilot (1899) and The Prospector (1904), which, combining adventure with religious messages and wholesome sentiment, made him the best-selling Canadian novelist of the early 20th century. His best books are considered to be The Man from Glengarry (1901) and Glengarry School Days (1902).
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Charles George Gordon, portrait by Lady Julia Abercromby; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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(born Dec. 29, 1800, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died July 1, 1860, New York, N.Y.) U.S. inventor of the vulcanization process that permitted the commercial use of rubber. Interested in treating rubber so that it would lose its adhesive quality and not melt, he discovered vulcanization in 1839 when he accidentally dropped a rubber-sulfur mixture onto a hot stove. The process would prove profoundly important for the future uses of rubber. He patented it in 1844 but had to fight numerous patent infringements in the U.S. and Europe. He never profited from his discovery, and he died in debt. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (founded 1898) honours his name.
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Mrs. Richard Yates, oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1793–94; in the National Gallery elipsis
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(born Sept. 14, 1867, Roxbury, Mass., U.S.—died Dec. 23, 1944, New York, N.Y.) U.S. illustrator. He studied at New York's Art Students League and began to contribute drawings to Life, Scribner's, Harper's, and Century. His “Gibson girl” drawings, relying on his wife as a model, defined the U.S. ideal of spirited feminine beauty at the turn of the century, and his refined pen-and-ink style was widely imitated. Collier's reportedly paid him the unprecedented sum of $50,000 to produce a double-page illustration every week for a year. He also published several collections of satirical drawings of high society.
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(born Dec. 7, 1879, Prague —died Nov. 12, 1972, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) Czech-born U.S. composer. He studied under
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(born Jan. 24, 1749, London, Eng.—died Sept. 13, 1806, Chiswick, Devon) British politician. He entered Parliament in 1768 and became leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons, where he used his brilliant oratorical skills to strongly oppose Britain's policy toward the American colonies. Almost always in the political opposition, he conducted a vendetta against George III and was later an enemy of William Pitt. He served as Britain's first foreign secretary (1782, 1783, 1806). He achieved two important reforms by steering through Parliament a resolution pledging it to end the slave trade and by enacting the 1792 Libel Act, which restored to juries their right to decide what constituted libel and whether or not a defendant was guilty of it. He is remembered as a great champion of liberty.
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Charles Fourier, engraving by Samuel Sartain after a painting by Jean-François Gigoux
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(born March 20, 1834, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1926, Northeast Harbor, Maine) U.S. educator and influential university president. He studied at Harvard University and taught mathematics and chemistry there (1858–63) and at MIT (1865–69). Eliot was named president of Harvard in 1869 after studying European educational systems, and he soon set about a program of fundamental reforms. He demanded a place for the sciences in liberal education, and he replaced the program of required courses for undergraduates with the elective system. Under Eliot, the graduate school of arts and sciences was created (1890), Radcliffe College was established (1894), the quality of the professional schools was raised, and the university became an institution of world renown. His reforms had widespread influence in American higher education. After resigning in 1909, he edited the 50-volume Harvard Classics (1909–10), wrote several books, and devoted himself to public service.
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(born June 3, 1904, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 1, 1950, near Burlington, N.C.) U.S. physician and surgeon. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. While researching the properties and preservation of blood plasma, he developed efficient ways to process and store plasma in blood banks. He directed the U.S. and Britain's World War II blood-plasma programs until 1942. An African American, he resigned over the segregation of the blood of blacks and whites in blood banks.
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(born Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, Eng.—died Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey) British logician, mathematician, and novelist. An unmarried deacon and a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford, he enjoyed the company of young girls. His novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865; illustrated by John Tenniel) is based on stories he told to amuse young friends, especially Alice Liddell. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), describes Alice's further adventures. The two books, full of whimsy but also of sophisticated wit and puzzles, became among the most famous and admired children's books in the world. Carroll's other works include the narrative nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and the children's novels Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). He was also an important early portrait photographer.
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(born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent) British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. The defining moment of Dickens's life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors' prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his public readings. Dickens's works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.
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(baptized March 4, 1745, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.—died July 25, 1814, London) British composer, novelist, and actor. A cathedral chorister, Dibdin began working for a music publisher at age 15 and began his stage career in 1762. His first operetta was The Shepherd's Artifice (1764). By 1778, when he became exclusive composer for Covent Garden, he had produced eight operas, including The Padlock (1768), The Waterman (1774), and The Quaker (1775). He later produced his ballad opera Liberty Hall. He was author, singer, and accompanist for his celebrated one-man “table entertainments”; most of his popular sea songs were written for these. In all, he wrote about 100 stage works and 1,400 songs. He was one of the most popular British composers of the 18th century.
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(born Nov. 8, 1883, Lancaster, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 23, 1935, Lancaster) U.S. painter. He studied in Philadelphia and later in Europe. On his return he became an important channel for the transmission of modern European movements into American art. Best known as an exponent of Precisionism, he excelled at watercolour and executed an outstanding series of flowers, circuses, and café scenes. Later he incorporated advertisements and billboard lettering into hard-edged, abstract cityscapes. Among his well-known works are his so-called “poster portraits” such as I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), a symbolic portrait of the poet William Carlos Williams.
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(born Aug. 27, 1865, Marietta, Ohio, U.S.—died April 23, 1951, Evanston, Ill.) U.S. politician. He practiced law in Nebraska before being appointed U.S. comptroller of the currency (1897–1902). In World War I he headed supply procurement for the American Expeditionary Force in France. In 1923 he chaired the Allied Reparations Commission and arranged the Dawes Plan. He served as vice president (1925–29) under Calvin Coolidge. He shared the 1925 Nobel Prize for Peace with Sir Austen Chamberlain.
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(born Feb. 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent) British naturalist. The grandson of Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and biology at Cambridge. He was recommended as a naturalist on HMS Beagle, which was bound on a long scientific survey expedition to South America and the South Seas (1831–36). His zoological and geological discoveries on the voyage resulted in numerous important publications and formed the basis of his theories of evolution. Seeing competition between individuals of a single species, he recognized that within a local population the individual bird, for example, with the sharper beak might have a better chance to survive and reproduce and that if such traits were passed on to new generations, they would be predominant in future populations. He saw this natural selection as the mechanism by which advantageous variations were passed on to later generations and less advantageous traits gradually disappeared. He worked on his theory for more than 20 years before publishing it in his famous On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The book was immediately in great demand, and Darwin's intensely controversial theory was accepted quickly in most scientific circles; most opposition came from religious leaders. Though Darwin's ideas were modified by later developments in genetics and molecular biology, his work remains central to modern evolutionary theory. His many other important works included Variation in Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) and The Descent of Manelipsis (1871). He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Seealso Darwinism.
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(born Aug. 8, 1819, Hinsdale, N.H., U.S.—died Oct. 17, 1897, Glen Cove, N.Y.) U.S. journalist. Dana lived at the utopian Brook Farm community for five years in the 1840s before becoming an editor for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, where he actively promoted the antislavery cause. He became a national figure as editor and part owner of the New York Sun (1868–97), which under his control was much admired and imitated. With George Ripley, he edited the New American Cyclopaedia (1857–63). He also edited a highly successful verse anthology and wrote books such as The Art of Newspaper Making (1895).
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(born Dec. 16, 1685, Amiens, Fr.—died Jan. 10, 1768, Paris) French cabinetmaker. He also studied sculpture and became an accomplished metalworker. In 1710 he went to Paris, where he worked in the studio of the cabinetmaker André-Charles Boulle. In 1715 Cressent was appointed official cabinetmaker to Philippe II, duke d'Orléans. He was elected to the Academy of St.-Luc in 1719, and he consequently received important commissions from French aristocrats, including Madame de Pompadour. His early works were in the Louis XIV style, but later pieces (circa 1730–50) were lighter and more curvilinear. Cressent was the leading proponent of the Régence style and introduced marquetries of coloured wood and ormolu to case decoration.
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(born Oct. 25, 1891, Hamilton, Ont., Can.—died Oct. 27, 1979, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., U.S.) Canadian-born U.S. clergyman. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1923, he became pastor of a Michigan church. In 1930 he began radio broadcasts of his sermons, into which he gradually injected reactionary political statements and anti-Semitic rhetoric. His sermons attracted one of the first deeply loyal mass audiences in broadcast history. He attacked Herbert Hoover and later turned on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His magazine, Social Justice, targeted Wall Street, communism, and Jews. It was banned from the mails and ceased publication in 1942, the same year the Catholic hierarchy ordered Coughlin to stop broadcasting.
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(born Aug. 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.—died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) U.S. sociologist. The son of an eminent Michigan jurist, Cooley taught sociology at the University of Michigan from 1894. He believed that the mind is social, that society is a mental construct, and that the moral unity of society derives from face-to-face relationships in primary groups such as the family and neighbourhood. In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), he referred to this form of social reference as “the looking glass self.” Cooley's other works include Social Organization (1909) and Social Process (1918).
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(born Feb. 9, 1891, Richmond, Surrey, Eng.—died May 19, 1958, Santa Barbara, Calif., U.S.) British-U.S. film actor. He began a stage and film career in England then moved in 1920 to the U.S., where he first won notice in The White Sister (1923). A romantic leading man, he appeared in other silent films such as Beau Geste (1926), and he easily made the transition to sound movies with his cultivated, expressive voice. His most notable films include Arrowsmith (1931), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937), If I Were King (1938), Random Harvest (1942), and A Double Life (1947, Academy Award).
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(born Aug. 6, 1868, Villeneuve-sur-Fère, France—died Feb. 23, 1955, Paris) French poet, playwright, and diplomat. He converted to Catholicism at age 18. His brilliant diplomatic career began in 1892, and he eventually served as ambassador to Japan (1921–27) and the U.S. (1927–33). At the same time he pursued a literary career, expressing in poetry and drama his conception of the grand design of creation. He reached his largest audience through plays such as Break of Noon (1906), The Hostage (1911), Tidings Brought to Mary (1912), and his masterpiece, The Satin Slipper (1929); recurring themes in these works are human and divine love and the search for salvation. He wrote the librettos for Darius Milhaud's opera Christopher Columbus (1930) and Arthur Honegger's oratorio Joan of Arc (1938). His best-known poetic work is the confessional Five Great Odes (1910).
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(born June 20, 1858, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 15, 1932, Cleveland) U.S. writer, the first important African American novelist. As a young school principal in North Carolina, he was so distressed by the treatment of African Americans that he moved his family to Cleveland, where he became an attorney and began writing in his spare time. He published numerous tales and essays, two collections of short stories, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and three novels, including The Colonel's Dream (1905). A psychological realist, he used familiar scenes of folk life to protest social injustice.
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(born Jan. 1, 1705, Boston, Mass.—died Feb. 10, 1787, Boston, Mass., U.S.) American clergyman. He served as minister of the First Church of Boston from 1727 until his death. He opposed the establishment of an Anglican bishopric in the American colonies. He is best known as a leading critic of the Great Awakening. He also wrote books, pamphlets, and sermons espousing the cause of the American Revolution.
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(born Sept. 23, 1930, Albany, Ga., U.S.—died June 10, 2004, Beverly Hills, Calif.) U.S. pianist, singer, and songwriter. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., where he began his musical career at age 5 in a neighbourhood café. By age 7 he had completely lost his sight. He learned to write scores in Braille. Orphaned at 15, he left school to play professionally. He recorded “Mess Around” and “It Should've Been Me” in 1952–53, and his arrangement for Guitar Slim's “The Things That I Used to Do” became a million-seller. Combining blues and gospel music influences, a distinctive raspy voice, and liquid phrasing, Charles later had hits with “What'd I Say,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Hit the Road, Jack.” His Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), marking unusual territory for a black performer, sold more than a million copies. He received 13 Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 1987. Charles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
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(born April 2, c. 742—died Jan. 28, 814, Aachen, Austrasia) King of the Franks (768–814) and emperor (800–14). The elder son of the Frankish king Pippin III (the Short), he ruled the Frankish kingdom jointly with his brother Carloman until the latter's death in 771. He then became sole king of the Franks and began a series of campaigns to conquer and Christianize neighbouring kingdoms. He defeated and became king of the Lombards in northern Italy (774). His expedition against the Muslims in Spain failed (778), but he successfully annexed Bavaria (788). Charlemagne fought against the Saxons for many years, finally defeating and Christianizing them in 804. He subdued the Avars of the Danube and gained control of many of the Slav states. With the exception of the British Isles, southern Italy, and part of Spain, he united in one vast state almost all the Christian lands of western Europe. His coronation as emperor at Rome on Christmas Day, 800, after restoring Leo III to the papacy, marks the revival of the empire in Latin Europe and was the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne established his capital at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), where he built a magnificent palace. He invited many scholars and poets to assist him in the promotion of the religious and cultural revival known as the Carolingian renaissance. He also codifed the laws and increased the use of writing in government and society. He was succeeded on his death by his son Louis the Pious, whom Charlemagne had crowned coemperor in 813. Seealso Carolingian dynasty.
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(born Nov. 10, 1433, Dijon, Burgundy [France]—died Jan. 5, 1477, near Nancy, Lorraine) Last of the great dukes of Burgundy (1467–77). An opponent of Louis XI of France, Charles tried to make Burgundy an independent kingdom. He had great success until 1474, casting off French rule, extending Burgundy's possessions, and building a centralized government. Charles brutally quelled a revolt in Liège (1468) and invaded Normandy (1471). Through negotiation, warfare, and purchases, he sought to extend his territory as far as the Rhine, but a coalition of Swiss, Austrians, and towns on the upper Rhine resisted him. He suffered defeats by the Swiss in 1476 and was killed in battle near Nancy.
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(born Nov. 8, 1622, Nyköping Castle, Swed.—died Feb. 13, 1660, Göteborg) King of Sweden (1809–18) and first king of the union of Sweden and Norway (1814–18). Second son of King Adolf Frederick (1710–71), he served as admiral of the fleet in the Russo-Swedish war. On the death of his brother Gustav III (1792), Charles became regent for his nephew Gustav IV. After the latter's deposition in 1809, Charles was elected king. He was prematurely aged and childless. In 1810 Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (later Charles XIV John) was named heir apparent; from then on, Charles was eclipsed by the crown prince.
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(born June 17, 1682, Stockholm, Swed.—died Nov. 30, 1718, Fredrikshald, Nor.) King of Sweden (1697–1718). Son of Charles XI, he became absolute monarch at age 15. He defended his country for 18 years in the Second Northern War, gradually taking increased responsibility for planning and executing armed operations. He launched a disastrous invasion of Russia (1707–09) that resulted in the collapse of the Swedish armies and the loss of Sweden's status as a great power. Ruling early in the Enlightenment, he promoted significant domestic reforms. He was killed during an invasion of Norway.
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(born Nov. 24, 1655, Stockholm, Swed.—died April 5, 1697, Stockholm) King of Sweden (1660–97). At age five he succeeded his father, Charles X Gustav, and the kingdom was ruled under a regency of aristocrats until Charles came of age in 1672. The regents drew Sweden into the Dutch War (1672–78), but Charles took control of the armies and won favorable results for Sweden by the Treaties of Nijmegen, after which he maintained a foreign policy of neutrality. Within Sweden, Charles expanded royal power at the expense of the higher nobility and established an absolutist monarchy.
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(born Oct. 9, 1757, Versailles, France—died Nov. 6, 1836, Gorizia, Friuli) King of France (1824–30). Fifth son of the dauphin Louis, and grandson of Louis XV, until 1824 he was known as Charles-Philippe, count d'Artois. During the French Revolution he went into exile and became the leader of the émigré nobility. Returning to France in 1814, he led the ultras during the Bourbon Restoration. On the death of his brother Louis XVIII, Charles became king. His popularity waned as his reign became increasingly reactionary. After the July Revolution he was forced to abdicate in favour of Louis-Philippe. His reign dramatized the failure of the Bourbons to reconcile the tradition of the monarchy by divine right with the democratic spirit produced in the wake of the Revolution.
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(born Aug. 28, 1916, Waco, Texas, U.S.—died March 20, 1962, Nyack, N.Y.) U.S. sociologist. After studying at the University of Texas (B.A., M.A., 1939) and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1941), Mills joined the faculty of Columbia University; there he became associated with the theories of Max Weber and with issues regarding the role of intellectuals in modern life, and he contributed to the development of a critical sociology in the U.S. and abroad. Mills believed social scientists should shun “abstracted empiricism” and become activists on behalf of social change. His radical analysis of U.S. business and society appeared in White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956); other works include The Causes of World War Three (1958) and The Sociological Imagination (1959). A colourful public figure, he wore black leather and rode a motorcycle. His death at 45 resulted from heart disease.
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(born April 15, 1741, Queen Anne's county, Md.—died Feb. 22, 1827, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. painter, inventor, and naturalist. He began his career by exchanging a saddle for painting lessons. He later went to London to study with Benjamin West. On his return he became the preeminent portrait painter of the middle colonies. He damaged his professional career by entering enthusiastically into the revolutionary movement. In 1786 he founded an institution in Philadelphia for the study of natural law and display of natural history and technological objects; the Peale Museum, the first major U.S. museum, was widely imitated by other museums of the period and later by P.T. Barnum. Peale is best remembered for his portraits of the leading figures of the American Revolution.
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(born March 20, 1834, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1926, Northeast Harbor, Maine) U.S. educator and influential university president. He studied at Harvard University and taught mathematics and chemistry there (1858–63) and at MIT (1865–69). Eliot was named president of Harvard in 1869 after studying European educational systems, and he soon set about a program of fundamental reforms. He demanded a place for the sciences in liberal education, and he replaced the program of required courses for undergraduates with the elective system. Under Eliot, the graduate school of arts and sciences was created (1890), Radcliffe College was established (1894), the quality of the professional schools was raised, and the university became an institution of world renown. His reforms had widespread influence in American higher education. After resigning in 1909, he edited the 50-volume Harvard Classics (1909–10), wrote several books, and devoted himself to public service.
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(born July 22, 1901, Lincoln, Neb., U.S.—died July 15, 1975, New York, N.Y.) U.S. modern dancer, teacher, and choreographer. He studied at the Denishawn school and was a member of its company in the 1920s. In 1928 he cofounded with Doris Humphrey the Humphrey-Weidman school and dance company, for which he choreographed many works. His dances, often comic and satiric, employed an abstract, rhythmic pantomime. In 1945 he established his own school, and in 1948 he founded the Theatre Dance Company, for which he choreographed his major work, Fables for Our Time. He continued to teach, choreograph, and dance into the 1970s.
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(born June 20, 1858, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 15, 1932, Cleveland) U.S. writer, the first important African American novelist. As a young school principal in North Carolina, he was so distressed by the treatment of African Americans that he moved his family to Cleveland, where he became an attorney and began writing in his spare time. He published numerous tales and essays, two collections of short stories, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and three novels, including The Colonel's Dream (1905). A psychological realist, he used familiar scenes of folk life to protest social injustice.
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(born June 30, 1470, Amboise, France—died April 7, 1498, Amboise) King of France (1483–98). He abandoned claims to parts of present-day France and Spain, and he consolidated French ownership of Brittany, in preparation for his grand enterprise, an expedition to Italy to assert his inherited right to the kingdom of Naples. This inaugurated wars with Italy that lasted more than 50 years and gained little in return for vast outlays. Charles was crowned in Naples in 1495, but his opponents rallied against him and he lost his conquests. He died while preparing another expedition.
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(born Feb. 22, 1403, Paris, France—died July 22, 1461, Mehun-sur-Yèvre) King of France (1422–61). Despite the treaty signed by his father, Charles VI, which excluded his succession, Charles assumed the h1 of king on his father's death. In 1429, with the aid of Joan of Arc, he raised the siege of Orléans. He drove the English from France (1436) and gradually recovered French lands, ending the Hundred Years' War. His financial and military reforms increased the power of the monarchy.
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(born Oct. 1, 1685, Vienna, Austria—died Oct. 20, 1740, Vienna) Holy Roman emperor (1711–40) and king of Hungary (as Charles III). Son of Emperor Leopold I, he tried unsuccessfully to claim the Spanish throne (as the pretender Charles III), which caused the War of the Spanish Succession. He conducted a successful war against the Ottoman Empire (1716–18) but lost the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38), and a new conflict with Turkey (1736–39) resulted in the loss of most of the territories gained in 1718. He promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction in an attempt to ensure that his daughter Maria Theresa would succeed him, which led to the War of the Austrian Succession.
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(born Feb. 24, 1500, Ghent—died Sept. 21, 1558, San Jerónimo de Yuste, Spain) Holy Roman emperor (1519–56) and king of Spain (as Charles I, 1516–56). Son of Philip I of Castile and grandson of Ferdinand V and Isabella I and of Emperor Maximilian I, he succeeded to his grandfathers' kingdoms on their deaths in 1516 and 1519, respectively. Important events of his reign include the Diet of Worms and the beginning of the Reformation; his defeat of Francis I, which assured Spanish supremacy in Italy (see Italian Wars); wars against Turkey under Süleyman I; the formation of the Schmalkaldic League; the Council of Trent; and the Peace of Augsburg. He struggled to hold his vast Spanish and Habsburg empire together against the growing forces of Protestantism, Turkish and French pressure, and even hostility from Pope Adrian VI. In 1555–56 Charles abdicated his claims to the Netherlands and Spain in favour of his son Philip II and the h1 of emperor to his brother Ferdinand I, and in 1557 he retired to a monastery in Spain.
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(born Sept. 17, 1884, Elmira, N.Y., U.S.—died April 8, 1920, New York City) U.S. composer. He studied music in Berlin with Engelbert Humperdinck and others, then returned and taught at a boys' school in Tarrytown, N.Y., for the rest of his short life. His early works reflect German Romanticism, but his mature style combined Impressionism and orientalism. His principal works are for piano, though some were later orchestrated: The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan (1912), a piano sonata (circa 1912), and Roman Sketches (including “The White Peacock”) (1915).
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(born Feb. 14, 1869, Glencorse, Midlothian, Scot.—died Nov. 15, 1959, Carlops, Peeblesshire) Scottish physicist. His invention of the Wilson cloud chamber, a device that became widely used in the study of radioactivity, X rays, cosmic rays, and other particle phenomena, also led to the later development of the bubble chamber. He shared the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics with Arthur Compton.
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(born Feb. 16, 1852, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 31, 1916, Pampa, Texas) U.S. religious leader who founded the International Bible Students Association, the forerunner of the Jehovah's Witnesses. He was raised in the Congregational church but rejected its teachings, unable to reconcile God's mercy with the idea of hell. Influenced by the Adventists, he adopted a doctrine of millennialism. He founded the International Bible Students Association in 1872 (renamed Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931) and taught that the final days would come in 1914 and that Christ's kingdom on earth would begin after a war between capitalism and socialism. In 1884 he founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, today one of the world's largest publishers. His books, pamphlets, and periodicals were widely circulated, and he won many converts despite the apparent failure of his apocalyptic prediction.
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Charles Sumner
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(born June 27, 1846, Avondale, County Wicklow, Ire.—died Oct. 6, 1891, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.) Irish nationalist leader. After an education at the University of Cambridge, he returned to Ireland and served in the British Parliament (1875–91), introducing obstructionist legislative tactics to call attention to Ireland's needs. In 1877 he became president of the Home Rule Confederation. He was jailed for making violent speeches against the new land act (1881–82), then released to curb an increase in terrorist acts. Reaction against the Phoenix Park murders enabled him to unite factions in Ireland to win support for parliamentary measures, such as William E. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals. He remained popular in Ireland until he was named in the divorce suit of his mistress, Katherine O'Shea (1890).
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(born May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos.) Yugoslavian-born U.S. poet. When he was 15 years old, he and his mother moved to Paris; a year later they joined his father in the U.S. After graduating from New York University, he translated Yugoslavian poetry into English. His first volume of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967), was recognized for its lively, surrealistic imagery; the collection The World Doesn't End (1989) won a Pulitzer Prize. He also published volumes in prose, including the memoir A Fly in the Soup (2000). He was named U.S. poet laureate in 2007.
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(born July 16, 1883, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died May 7, 1965, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.) U.S. painter and photographer. Educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he initially earned a living as a photographer. His acclaimed series of photographs of the Ford automobile plant at River Rouge, Mich. (1927), was followed by a series on Chartres Cathedral (1929). In his paintings, early Cubist influences led to the Precisionism of his maturity. He treated industrial and architectural subjects in an abstract-realist style, emphasizing their formal qualities, as in his painting Rolling Power (1939), which revealed the abstract power of a locomotive's driving wheels.
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(born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.—died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.) U.S. scientist, logician, and philosopher. He was the son of the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce (1809–80). After attending Harvard University he spent 30 years with the U.S. Coast Guard Survey (1861–91). As a scientist, he is noted for his contributions to the theory of probability, the study of gravity, and the logic of scientific methodology. He eventually abandoned the physical sciences to study logic, which in its widest sense he identified with semiotics. He lectured on logic at Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1894, then spent the rest of his life writing in seclusion. He is regarded as the founder of pragmatism. Though he made eminent contributions to deductive logic, he was a student primarily of “the logic of science”—i.e., of induction and of “retroduction,” or “abduction,” the forming and accepting on probation of a hypothesis in order to explain surprising facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish induction and abduction as permanent branches of logic.
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(born Jan. 7, 1912, Westfield, N.J., U.S.—died Sept. 29, 1988, New York, N.Y.) U.S. cartoonist. He worked briefly as a commercial artist before selling his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1933. He became famous for darkly humorous cartoons depicting morbid behaviour by sinister-looking characters, especially a family of ghouls whose activities travestied those of a conventional family; in one popular image, they prepare to pour boiling oil on a group of Christmas carolers. These evolved into The Addams Family, a 1960s television series that generated two Hollywood films.
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(born Feb. 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent) British naturalist. The grandson of Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and biology at Cambridge. He was recommended as a naturalist on HMS Beagle, which was bound on a long scientific survey expedition to South America and the South Seas (1831–36). His zoological and geological discoveries on the voyage resulted in numerous important publications and formed the basis of his theories of evolution. Seeing competition between individuals of a single species, he recognized that within a local population the individual bird, for example, with the sharper beak might have a better chance to survive and reproduce and that if such traits were passed on to new generations, they would be predominant in future populations. He saw this natural selection as the mechanism by which advantageous variations were passed on to later generations and less advantageous traits gradually disappeared. He worked on his theory for more than 20 years before publishing it in his famous On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The book was immediately in great demand, and Darwin's intensely controversial theory was accepted quickly in most scientific circles; most opposition came from religious leaders. Though Darwin's ideas were modified by later developments in genetics and molecular biology, his work remains central to modern evolutionary theory. His many other important works included Variation in Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) and The Descent of Manelipsis (1871). He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Seealso Darwinism.
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(born June 3, 1904, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 1, 1950, near Burlington, N.C.) U.S. physician and surgeon. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. While researching the properties and preservation of blood plasma, he developed efficient ways to process and store plasma in blood banks. He directed the U.S. and Britain's World War II blood-plasma programs until 1942. An African American, he resigned over the segregation of the blood of blacks and whites in blood banks.
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(born June 7, 1868, Glasgow, Scot.—died Dec. 10, 1928, London, Eng.) Scottish architect, furniture designer, and artist. A giant of the Arts and Crafts Movement, he is especially revered for his glass-and-stone studio building at the Glasgow School of Art (1896–1909), where he had attended classes. In the 1890s he achieved an international reputation creating unorthodox posters, craftwork, and furniture. Considered Britain's first designer of true Art Nouveau architecture, he produced work of an unrivaled lightness, elegance, and originality, as exemplified by four remarkable tearooms he designed in Glasgow (1896–1904). By 1914 he was dedicating all his energies to watercolour painting. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in his work and the manufacture of reproductions of his chairs and settees, which were characterized by starkly simple geometric lines.
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(born June 8, 1814, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died April 11, 1884, London) English novelist and dramatist. Though trained in law and an administrator at Oxford University, he put much of his time and resources into writing and staging his melodramatic plays. His novels expose, with passionate indignation, the social injustices of his times. He is best remembered for the historical romance The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). His other novels include It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), attacking prison conditions; Hard Cash (1863), on the abuse of mental patients; and Put Yourself in His Place (1870), about terrorism by trade unionists.
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Charles Steinmetz.
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(born Oct. 26, 1757, Charleston, S.C.—died Oct. 29, 1824, Charleston, S.C., U.S.) U.S. statesman. A cousin of Charles C. Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney, he fought in the American Revolution. From 1784 to 1787 he served in the Continental Congress, where he was instrumental in calling for the Constitutional Convention. As a delegate to the convention from South Carolina, he proposed numerous provisions that were incorporated in the final draft of the Constitution of the United States. He helped write the South Carolina constitution and was also governor of the state (1789–92, 1796–98, 1806–08). He served in the U.S. Senate from 1798 to 1801 and as minister to Spain from 1801 to 1805.
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(born Jan. 12, 1628, Paris, France—died May 15/16, 1703, Paris) French poet, prose writer, and storyteller. Perrault began to win a literary reputation circa 1660 with light verse and love poetry. He is best remembered for his collection of charming fairy stories written to amuse his children, Contes de ma mère l'oye, or Tales of Mother Goose (1697; see Mother Goose). He spent the rest of his life promoting the study of literature and the arts. A leading member of the Académie Française, he was involved in a famous controversy with Nicholas Boileau on the relative merits of ancient and modern literature; his support for the modern was of landmark significance in the revolt against the constraints of prevailing tradition.
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C.P. Snow
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(born April 22, 1922, Nogales, Ariz., U.S.—died Jan. 5, 1979, Cuernavaca, Mex.) U.S. jazz composer, bassist, and bandleader. Mingus played in the groups of Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and Red Norvo, ultimately working with many of the innovators of bebop. In 1953 he organized the Jazz Workshop ensemble, which played a spirited combination of loosely arranged passages and improvisation, incorporating elements of the blues and free jazz. As a pioneering bandleader and virtuoso bassist, Mingus remained an uncompromising and innovative force in jazz for the rest of his career. He was one of the most important and colourful figures in modern jazz.
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(born Feb. 18, 1862, Williamsburg, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 18, 1939, New York, N.Y.) U.S. entrepreneur and steel-industry pioneer. He joined Andrew Carnegie's steelworks at Braddock, Pa., as a labourer and rose swiftly in the Carnegie empire. In 1892 Carnegie delegated to Schwab the task of returning the plant in Homestead, Pa., to normal production after the bloody Homestead Strike. His success in improving labour relations and increasing production led to his appointment as president of Carnegie Steel Co. in 1897 at the age of 35. Schwab proposed the merger of the competing steel companies that would create the U.S. Steel Corp., and he became its first president in 1901. He resigned in 1903 to devote himself to the Bethlehem Steel Corp., which he built into one of the nation's largest steel producers of its time.
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(born circa 688—died Oct. 22, 741, Quierzy-sur-Oise, Fr.) Carolingian mayor of the palace (715–41). He was a child born out of wedlock to Pippin of Herstal, mayor of the palace and virtual ruler of the Frankish realm in the waning days of the Merovingian dynasty. On his father's death he overcame family opposition and rivals among the nobility to reunite and rule the entire Frankish realm. He subdued Neustria (724), attacked Aquitaine, and fought against the Frisians, Saxons, and Bavarians. His victory at the Battle of Tours/Poitiers (732) stemmed the Muslim invasion, and he controlled Burgundy by 739. He also supported the activities of St. Boniface and other missionaries. In Frankish royal tradition, he divided the kingdom between his sons Pippin III and Carloman who succeeded him as mayor; his grandson was Charlemagne.
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(born Feb. 24, 1619, Paris, France—died Feb. 12, 1690, Paris) French painter and designer. After study in Paris and Rome, he received large decorative and religious commissions that made his reputation. Possessing extraordinary organizational as well as technical skills, as the first painter to Louis XIV he created or supervised the production of most of the paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects commissioned by the French government for three decades, notably for the Palace of Versailles. As director of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and organizer of the French Academy at Rome, he was instrumental in establishing the characteristic homogeneity of French art in the 17th century.
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(born July 1, 1899, Scarborough, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Dec. 15, 1962, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) British actor. He made his London stage debut in 1926 and acted in plays such as The Government Inspector, Medea, and Payment Deferred, in which he made his New York debut in 1931. He appeared in movies from 1929 and earned international acclaim in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933, Academy Award). With his bulky frame and ordinary face Laughton defied Hollywood typecasting and emerged as one of the most versatile performers of his generation. He played a wide range of character roles in films such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Advise and Consent (1962). He directed the memorable The Night of the Hunter (1955).
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(born Feb. 10, 1775, London, Eng.—died Dec. 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex) English essayist and critic. Lamb was employed as a clerk at East India House (headquarters for the East India Company) from 1792 to 1825. From 1796 he was guardian of his sister, the writer Mary Lamb (1764–1847), who, in a fit of madness (which proved recurrent), had killed their mother. He is best known for the often autobiographical essays he wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine, collected in Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Among the greatest of English letter writers, he included some of his most perceptive literary criticism, often in the form of marginalia, in letters. He collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespear (1807), a highly popular retelling of the plays for children.
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(born June 12, 1819, Holne Vicarage, Devon, Eng.—died Jan. 23, 1875, Eversley, Hampshire) English clergyman and novelist. After studies at Cambridge, he became a parish priest and later chaplain to Queen Victoria, professor of modern history at Cambridge, and canon of Westminster. An enthusiastic advocate of Christian socialism, he published several novels about social problems before writing the very successful historical novels Hypatia (1853), Westward Ho! (1855), and Hereward the Wake (1866). Fearing the Anglican church's trend in the direction of Catholicism, he engaged in a famous controversy with John Henry Newman. His wholehearted acceptance of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution inspired his popular children's book The Water-Babies (1863).
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(born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent) British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. The defining moment of Dickens's life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors' prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his public readings. Dickens's works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.
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(born Jan. 24, 1749, London, Eng.—died Sept. 13, 1806, Chiswick, Devon) British politician. He entered Parliament in 1768 and became leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons, where he used his brilliant oratorical skills to strongly oppose Britain's policy toward the American colonies. Almost always in the political opposition, he conducted a vendetta against George III and was later an enemy of William Pitt. He served as Britain's first foreign secretary (1782, 1783, 1806). He achieved two important reforms by steering through Parliament a resolution pledging it to end the slave trade and by enacting the 1792 Libel Act, which restored to juries their right to decide what constituted libel and whether or not a defendant was guilty of it. He is remembered as a great champion of liberty.
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(born Oct. 4, 1550, Stockholm, Swed.—died Oct. 30, 1611, Nyköping) King of Sweden (1604–11). Third son of Gustav I Vasa, he helped lead a rebellion against the rule of his half brother Erik XIV that placed his other brother on the throne as John III. After the accession (1592) of his devoutly Catholic nephew, Sigismund III, Charles called the Convention of Uppsala, which demanded that Lutheranism be retained as the national religion. He opposed Sigismund in a civil war, and after the latter was deposed Charles became the virtual ruler of Sweden (1599–1604). Declared king in 1604, he pursued an aggressive foreign policy that led to war with Poland (1605) and Denmark (the Kalmar War, 1611–13).
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(born Nov. 11, 1748, Portici, Kingdom of Naples—died Jan. 20, 1819, Rome) King of Spain (1788–1808) during the turbulent period of the French Revolution. Son of Charles III, he lacked leadership qualities and entrusted the government to Manuel de Godoy. After a French invasion in 1794, Spain was reduced to the status of a French satellite. When Napoleon again occupied northern Spain in 1807, Charles was forced to abdicate (1808) and go into exile.
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(born 839, Bavaria? [Germany]—died Jan. 13, 888, Neidingen) Frankish king and emperor (881–87). The great-grandson of Charlemagne, he inherited the kingdoms of Swabia (876) and Italy (879). Charles was crowned emperor by the pope in 881. He gained control of the eastern and western Frankish kingdoms on the deaths of their rulers, and by 885 he had reunited all of Charlemagne's empire except Provence. Chronically ill, he failed to attack the Saracens and used tribute to buy off Viking invaders. His nephew Arnulf led an uprising against him in 887, and his fall marked the final disintegration of the empire of Charlemagne.
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(born 1332—died Jan. 1, 1387) King of Navarra (1349–87). He acquired Normandy from John II of France by threatening an English alliance. Arrested for his treachery in 1356, he escaped a year later and regained Normandy. He pursued shifting alliances in Spain in an effort to expand Navarrese power. Charles V voided his claims in France, and the discovery of his plot to poison the French king cost him all of Normandy except Cherbourg.
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(born March 1226—died Jan. 7, 1285, Foggia, Kingdom of Naples [Italy]) King of Naples and Sicily (1266–85), the first of the Angevin dynasty. The younger brother of Louis IX of France, Charles allied with the papacy and conquered Naples and Sicily in the 1260s, defeating the last representatives of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. He created a great but short-lived Mediterranean empire, expanding into the Balkans and becoming heir to the kingdom of Jerusalem (1277). The Sicilians rebelled against French domination in 1282 (see Sicilian Vespers) and drove out the Angevins in 1284. Charles died while preparing a counteroffensive, and his kingdom was eventually secured by the Spanish.
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(born Aug. 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.—died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) U.S. sociologist. The son of an eminent Michigan jurist, Cooley taught sociology at the University of Michigan from 1894. He believed that the mind is social, that society is a mental construct, and that the moral unity of society derives from face-to-face relationships in primary groups such as the family and neighbourhood. In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), he referred to this form of social reference as “the looking glass self.” Cooley's other works include Social Organization (1909) and Social Process (1918).
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(born Feb. 27, 1899, West Pembroke, Maine, U.S.—died March 31, 1978, Toronto, Ont., Can.) U.S.-born Canadian physiologist. He was a professor and administrator at the University of Toronto 1929–67. With Frederick Banting, he was the first to obtain a pancreatic extract of insulin in a form useful for controlling diabetes mellitus (1921). He did not receive the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Banting and J. J. R. Macleod because he did not yet have his medical degree, although Banting voluntarily shared his portion of the prize with Best. Best also discovered the vitamin choline and the enzyme histaminase and was one of the first to introduce anticoagulants to treat thrombosis.
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(born March 4, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died April 3, 1991, Encino, Calif.) U.S. contract bridge authority. Goren learned bridge while a law student at McGill University. His innovative system of point-count bidding and his repeated successes in tournaments made him one of the world's most famous and influential players. His several popular books include the widely translated Goren's Bridge Complete (1963).
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(born July 28, 1915, Greenville, S.C., U.S.) U.S. physicist. He studied at Furman University, Duke University, and the California Institute of Technology and worked for Bell Labs before joining the faculty of Columbia University (1948). In the early 1950s he and his students constructed the first maser and showed that a similar device producing visible light was also possible. For his role in the invention of the maser and later the laser, he shared a 1964 Nobel Prize with Aleksandr M. Prokhorov (b. 1916) and Nikolay G. Basov (b. 1922).
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(born Dec. 28, 1719, Dijon, France—died Feb. 13, 1787, Versailles) French statesman. As ambassador to Ottoman Turkey (1754–68), he ably defended French policies during the Seven Years' War. As Louis XVI's minister of foreign affairs (1774–87), he advocated French financial and military support for the colonists in the American Revolution, concluded an alliance with them (1778), and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1783). He also worked to establish a stable balance of power in Europe by mediating the peace in the War of the Bavarian Succession.
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(born Dec. 29, 1800, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died July 1, 1860, New York, N.Y.) U.S. inventor of the vulcanization process that permitted the commercial use of rubber. Interested in treating rubber so that it would lose its adhesive quality and not melt, he discovered vulcanization in 1839 when he accidentally dropped a rubber-sulfur mixture onto a hot stove. The process would prove profoundly important for the future uses of rubber. He patented it in 1844 but had to fight numerous patent infringements in the U.S. and Europe. He never profited from his discovery, and he died in debt. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (founded 1898) honours his name.
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Charles George Gordon, portrait by Lady Julia Abercromby; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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(born Aug. 27, 1865, Marietta, Ohio, U.S.—died April 23, 1951, Evanston, Ill.) U.S. politician. He practiced law in Nebraska before being appointed U.S. comptroller of the currency (1897–1902). In World War I he headed supply procurement for the American Expeditionary Force in France. In 1923 he chaired the Allied Reparations Commission and arranged the Dawes Plan. He served as vice president (1925–29) under Calvin Coolidge. He shared the 1925 Nobel Prize for Peace with Sir Austen Chamberlain.
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Charles Frederick Worth, detail of an engraving
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Charles Francis Adams
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(born Aug. 24, 1847, Chester County, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 14, 1909, St. James, Long Island, N.Y.) U.S. architect. He was educated at Harvard University and in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1879 he joined William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White to found McKim, Mead & White, the most successful U.S. architectural firm of its time. Until 1887 the firm excelled at Shingle style residences. In later years it championed the formal Renaissance tradition and its Classical antecedents, helping to inspire a Neoclassical revival. Among the widely admired examples of McKim's formal planning are the Boston Public Library (1887), the Columbia University Library (1893), the building program of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893, with Daniel H. Burnham and Richard Morris Hunt), and in New York City the Morgan Library (1903) and the magnificent Pennsylvania Railway Station (1904–10; demolished 1963).
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(born April 11, 1862, Glens Falls, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 27, 1948, Osterville, Mass.) U.S. jurist and statesman. He became prominent in 1905 as counsel to New York legislative committees investigating abuses in the life insurance and utilities industries. His two terms as governor of New York (1906–10) were marked by extensive reform. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1910 but resigned in 1916 to run as the Republican presidential candidate. After losing the election to Woodrow Wilson in a close race, he returned to his law practice. As secretary of state (1921–25), he planned and chaired the Washington Conference (1921–22). He served as a member of the Hague Tribunal (1926–30) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (1928–30) before being appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1930 by Pres. Herbert Hoover. He led the court through the great controversies arising out the New Deal legislation of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt. Although generally favouring the exercise of government power, he spoke for the court in invalidating (in
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(born April 9, 1893, Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan. 10, 1967, Gardenville, N.Y.) U.S. painter. He attended the Cleveland School of Art and, after service in World War I, worked as a wallpaper designer in Buffalo, N.Y. In the 1920s and '30s he was one of the leading painters of American life; his work was associated with Edward Hopper's in its portrayal of the loneliness and bleakness of small-town life (e.g., November Evening, 1934). In the 1940s he abandoned realism for a more personal interpretation of nature, emphasizing its mystery, movement, and colour from season to season (e.g., The Sphinx and the Milky Way, 1946).
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(born Dec. 31, 1720, Rome—died Jan. 31, 1788, Rome) Claimant to the British throne. He was the son of the royal pretender James Edward and grandson of the exiled James II of England. Seeking to regain the throne, in 1745 the “Young Pretender” landed in Scotland, where he raised an army of 2,400 among the clans. After taking Edinburgh and routing the English at Prestonpans, he crossed the English border and reached Derby, but a lack of strong support from the Jacobites and the French forced his retreat into Scotland. He was decisively defeated at the Battle of Culloden (1746) and, aided by Flora Macdonald (1722–90) and disguised as her maid, escaped to France. He wandered about Europe trying to revive his cause, but his debauched behaviour alienated his friends. He settled in Italy in 1766. He later became romanticized in ballads and legends.
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(born Oct. 25, 1891, Hamilton, Ont., Can.—died Oct. 27, 1979, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., U.S.) Canadian-born U.S. clergyman. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1923, he became pastor of a Michigan church. In 1930 he began radio broadcasts of his sermons, into which he gradually injected reactionary political statements and anti-Semitic rhetoric. His sermons attracted one of the first deeply loyal mass audiences in broadcast history. He attacked Herbert Hoover and later turned on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His magazine, Social Justice, targeted Wall Street, communism, and Jews. It was banned from the mails and ceased publication in 1942, the same year the Catholic hierarchy ordered Coughlin to stop broadcasting.
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(baptized March 4, 1745, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.—died July 25, 1814, London) British composer, novelist, and actor. A cathedral chorister, Dibdin began working for a music publisher at age 15 and began his stage career in 1762. His first operetta was The Shepherd's Artifice (1764). By 1778, when he became exclusive composer for Covent Garden, he had produced eight operas, including The Padlock (1768), The Waterman (1774), and The Quaker (1775). He later produced his ballad opera Liberty Hall. He was author, singer, and accompanist for his celebrated one-man “table entertainments”; most of his popular sea songs were written for these. In all, he wrote about 100 stage works and 1,400 songs. He was one of the most popular British composers of the 18th century.
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(born Nov. 8, 1883, Lancaster, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 23, 1935, Lancaster) U.S. painter. He studied in Philadelphia and later in Europe. On his return he became an important channel for the transmission of modern European movements into American art. Best known as an exponent of Precisionism, he excelled at watercolour and executed an outstanding series of flowers, circuses, and café scenes. Later he incorporated advertisements and billboard lettering into hard-edged, abstract cityscapes. Among his well-known works are his so-called “poster portraits” such as I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), a symbolic portrait of the poet William Carlos Williams.
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(born Sept. 14, 1867, Roxbury, Mass., U.S.—died Dec. 23, 1944, New York, N.Y.) U.S. illustrator. He studied at New York's Art Students League and began to contribute drawings to Life, Scribner's, Harper's, and Century. His “Gibson girl” drawings, relying on his wife as a model, defined the U.S. ideal of spirited feminine beauty at the turn of the century, and his refined pen-and-ink style was widely imitated. Collier's reportedly paid him the unprecedented sum of $50,000 to produce a double-page illustration every week for a year. He also published several collections of satirical drawings of high society.
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(born Dec. 16, 1685, Amiens, Fr.—died Jan. 10, 1768, Paris) French cabinetmaker. He also studied sculpture and became an accomplished metalworker. In 1710 he went to Paris, where he worked in the studio of the cabinetmaker André-Charles Boulle. In 1715 Cressent was appointed official cabinetmaker to Philippe II, duke d'Orléans. He was elected to the Academy of St.-Luc in 1719, and he consequently received important commissions from French aristocrats, including Madame de Pompadour. His early works were in the Louis XIV style, but later pieces (circa 1730–50) were lighter and more curvilinear. Cressent was the leading proponent of the Régence style and introduced marquetries of coloured wood and ormolu to case decoration.
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(born Feb. 25, 1746, Charleston, S.C.—died Aug. 16, 1825, Charleston, S.C., U.S.) U.S. soldier, statesman, and diplomat. A cousin of Charles Pinckney and the brother of Thomas Pinckney, he was an aide to George Washington in the American Revolution, commanded at Savannah, Ga., and was promoted to brigadier general in 1783. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Appointed minister to France (1796), he was involved in negotiations that ended in the XYZ Affair; when one of the group of French negotiators suggested that the U.S. representatives offer a gift in order to gain a peace treaty, Pinckney is said to have replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence!” He was the unsuccessful Federalist candidate for vice president in 1800 and for president in 1804 and 1808.
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(born Jan. 1, 1705, Boston, Mass.—died Feb. 10, 1787, Boston, Mass., U.S.) American clergyman. He served as minister of the First Church of Boston from 1727 until his death. He opposed the establishment of an Anglican bishopric in the American colonies. He is best known as a leading critic of the Great Awakening. He also wrote books, pamphlets, and sermons espousing the cause of the American Revolution.
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(born Sept. 19, 1737, Annapolis, Md.—died Nov. 14, 1832, Baltimore, Md., U.S.) American patriot leader. He attended Jesuit colleges in Maryland and studied law in France and England. He served on Committees of Correspondence, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served in the Continental Congress (1776–78). He was a U.S. senator (1789–92).
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(born April 7, 1726, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.—died April 12, 1814, Chelsea, Middlesex) British music historian. After being apprenticed to Thomas Arne, he taught music and played the organ. In 1770 he set off on European travels, undertaken to research his seminal General History of Music, 4 vol. (1776–89). His accounts of the many famous musicians and others he met, including Christoph Willibald Gluck and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, provide an entertaining and invaluable account of 18th-century European musical life and of intellectual life in general. The novelist Fanny Burney was his daughter.
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(born April 9, 1893, Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan. 10, 1967, Gardenville, N.Y.) U.S. painter. He attended the Cleveland School of Art and, after service in World War I, worked as a wallpaper designer in Buffalo, N.Y. In the 1920s and '30s he was one of the leading painters of American life; his work was associated with Edward Hopper's in its portrayal of the loneliness and bleakness of small-town life (e.g., November Evening, 1934). In the 1940s he abandoned realism for a more personal interpretation of nature, emphasizing its mystery, movement, and colour from season to season (e.g., The Sphinx and the Milky Way, 1946).
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(born Aug. 8, 1763, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony—died April 4, 1844, Boston, Mass., U.S.) First professional U.S. architect. He studied at Harvard University and then toured Europe, visiting major architectural sites in France and Italy. Most of his works incorporate Classical orders and show a mastery of proportion. Chiefly a designer of government buildings, he served as architect of the U.S. Capitol in 1817–30. He used the plans of his immediate predecessor, Benjamin H. Latrobe, for the wings but prepared a new design for the rotunda. His son Thomas Bulfinch (1796–1867) wrote the famous Bulfinch's Mythology.
Learn more about Bulfinch, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Aug. 16, 1920, Andernach, Ger.—died March 9, 1994, San Pedro, Calif., U.S.) German-born U.S. poet, short-story writer, and novelist. His family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1922. He began publishing short stories in the mid 1940s. His first poetry collection, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1959, and the poetry volumes he published regularly for the next few years earned a devoted cult following. His novels include Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975); he also wrote the screenplay for the film Barfly (1987), a semiautobiographical comedy about alcoholic lovers. The novel Hollywood (1989) dealt with its filming. His writing, often scurrilous but humorous, frequently reflected his perpetually down-and-out mode of existence.
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(born Jan. 17, 1771, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 22, 1810, Philadelphia) U.S. writer. Brown left his law studies to devote himself to writing. His gothic novels in American settings were the first in a tradition later adapted by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wieland (1798), his best-known work, shows the ease with which mental balance is lost when common sense is confronted with the uncanny. His writings reflect a thoughtful liberalism while exploiting horror and terror. He has been called the “father of the American novel.”
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Baudelaire, photograph by Étienne Carjat, 1863.
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Charles Babbage, detail of an oil painting by Samuel Lawrence, 1845; in the National Portrait elipsis
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(born Nov. 27, 1874, near Knightstown, Ind., U.S.—died Sept. 1, 1948, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. historian. Beard taught at Columbia University (1904–17) and cofounded New York's New School for Social Research (1919). He is best known for iconoclastic studies of the development of U.S. political institutions, emphasizing the dynamics of socioeconomic conflict and change and analyzing motivational factors in the founding of institutions. His works include An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), claiming that the Constitution was formulated to serve the economic interests of the founders; The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915); and, with his wife, Mary R. Beard (1876–1958), The Rise of American Civilization (1927).
Learn more about Beard, Charles A(ustin) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
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Charles A. Lindbergh in front of his airplane Spirit of St. Louis, 1927.
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(born Aug. 8, 1819, Hinsdale, N.H., U.S.—died Oct. 17, 1897, Glen Cove, N.Y.) U.S. journalist. Dana lived at the utopian Brook Farm community for five years in the 1840s before becoming an editor for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, where he actively promoted the antislavery cause. He became a national figure as editor and part owner of the New York Sun (1868–97), which under his control was much admired and imitated. With George Ripley, he edited the New American Cyclopaedia (1857–63). He also edited a highly successful verse anthology and wrote books such as The Art of Newspaper Making (1895).
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(born Oct. 2, 1798, Turin, Piedmont, French Republic—died July 28, 1849, Oporto, Port.) King of Sardinia-Piedmont (1831–49). A member of the house of Savoy, he ascended the throne after the death of Charles Felix in 1831. He mitigated the harsh administration of his country and accelerated its economic and social development. The spread of revolutionary ideas forced him to grant a statute for representative government in 1848. After the election of Pius IX as pope and the Austrian occupation of Ferrara, he sought to lead the liberation of Italy. He went to war against Austria in 1848 and again in 1849, but, after his defeat in the Battle of Novara, he abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel II.
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Baudelaire, photograph by Étienne Carjat, 1863.
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Charles de Gaulle, 1967.
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(born Sept. 19, 1737, Annapolis, Md.—died Nov. 14, 1832, Baltimore, Md., U.S.) American patriot leader. He attended Jesuit colleges in Maryland and studied law in France and England. He served on Committees of Correspondence, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served in the Continental Congress (1776–78). He was a U.S. senator (1789–92).
Learn more about Carroll, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born April 7, 1726, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.—died April 12, 1814, Chelsea, Middlesex) British music historian. After being apprenticed to Thomas Arne, he taught music and played the organ. In 1770 he set off on European travels, undertaken to research his seminal General History of Music, 4 vol. (1776–89). His accounts of the many famous musicians and others he met, including Christoph Willibald Gluck and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, provide an entertaining and invaluable account of 18th-century European musical life and of intellectual life in general. The novelist Fanny Burney was his daughter.
Learn more about Burney, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Aug. 8, 1763, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony—died April 4, 1844, Boston, Mass., U.S.) First professional U.S. architect. He studied at Harvard University and then toured Europe, visiting major architectural sites in France and Italy. Most of his works incorporate Classical orders and show a mastery of proportion. Chiefly a designer of government buildings, he served as architect of the U.S. Capitol in 1817–30. He used the plans of his immediate predecessor, Benjamin H. Latrobe, for the wings but prepared a new design for the rotunda. His son Thomas Bulfinch (1796–1867) wrote the famous Bulfinch's Mythology.
Learn more about Bulfinch, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Aug. 16, 1920, Andernach, Ger.—died March 9, 1994, San Pedro, Calif., U.S.) German-born U.S. poet, short-story writer, and novelist. His family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1922. He began publishing short stories in the mid 1940s. His first poetry collection, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1959, and the poetry volumes he published regularly for the next few years earned a devoted cult following. His novels include Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975); he also wrote the screenplay for the film Barfly (1987), a semiautobiographical comedy about alcoholic lovers. The novel Hollywood (1989) dealt with its filming. His writing, often scurrilous but humorous, frequently reflected his perpetually down-and-out mode of existence.
Learn more about Bukowski, Charles with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Jan. 17, 1771, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 22, 1810, Philadelphia) U.S. writer. Brown left his law studies to devote himself to writing. His gothic novels in American settings were the first in a tradition later adapted by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wieland (1798), his best-known work, shows the ease with which mental balance is lost when common sense is confronted with the uncanny. His writings reflect a thoughtful liberalism while exploiting horror and terror. He has been called the “father of the American novel.”
Learn more about Brown, Charles Brockden with a free trial on Britannica.com.
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Louis Blanc.
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(born Feb. 27, 1899, West Pembroke, Maine, U.S.—died March 31, 1978, Toronto, Ont., Can.) U.S.-born Canadian physiologist. He was a professor and administrator at the University of Toronto 1929–67. With Frederick Banting, he was the first to obtain a pancreatic extract of insulin in a form useful for controlling diabetes mellitus (1921). He did not receive the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Banting and J. J. R. Macleod because he did not yet have his medical degree, although Banting voluntarily shared his portion of the prize with Best. Best also discovered the vitamin choline and the enzyme histaminase and was one of the first to introduce anticoagulants to treat thrombosis.
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(born Sept. 15, 1889, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 21, 1945, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. drama critic, actor, and humorist. Benchley graduated from Harvard University and joined the staff of Life magazine in 1920. A regular member of the Algonquin Round Table, he was drama critic for The New Yorker 1929–40, for which he also wrote “The Wayward Press” column under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes. He had bit parts in many feature films, but he is best known for more than 40 short subjects, including How to Sleep (1934, Academy Award). His writing was warmly humorous, his satire sharp but not cruel.
Learn more about Benchley, Robert (Charles) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
(born Nov. 27, 1874, near Knightstown, Ind., U.S.—died Sept. 1, 1948, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. historian. Beard taught at Columbia University (1904–17) and cofounded New York's New School for Social Research (1919). He is best known for iconoclastic studies of the development of U.S. political institutions, emphasizing the dynamics of socioeconomic conflict and change and analyzing motivational factors in the founding of institutions. His works include An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), claiming that the Constitution was formulated to serve the economic interests of the founders; The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915); and, with his wife, Mary R. Beard (1876–1958), The Rise of American Civilization (1927).
Learn more about Beard, Charles A(ustin) with a free trial on Britannica.com.
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Charles Babbage, detail of an oil painting by Samuel Lawrence, 1845; in the National Portrait elipsis
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Algernon Charles Swinburne, watercolour by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1862; in the Fitzwilliam Museum, elipsis
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(born June 23, 1894, Hoboken, N.J., U.S.—died Aug. 25, 1956, Bloomington, Ind.) U.S. zoologist and expert on human sexual behaviour. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1920, he taught zoology at Indiana University, where he became the founder-director, in 1942, of the university's Institute for Sex Research (renamed the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Inc., in 1981). His inquiries into human sexuality led him to publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). These reports, based on 18,500 personal interviews, received extraordinary publicity for their conclusions about contemporary sexual mores and behaviour. Kinsey's methodologies and statistical samplings, however, have been highly questioned and criticized in recent years.
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Alexis de Tocqueville, detail of an oil painting by T. Chassériau; in the Versailles Museum.
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(born Jan. 7, 1912, Westfield, N.J., U.S.—died Sept. 29, 1988, New York, N.Y.) U.S. cartoonist. He worked briefly as a commercial artist before selling his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1933. He became famous for darkly humorous cartoons depicting morbid behaviour by sinister-looking characters, especially a family of ghouls whose activities travestied those of a conventional family; in one popular image, they prepare to pour boiling oil on a group of Christmas carolers. These evolved into The Addams Family, a 1960s television series that generated two Hollywood films.
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Charles Francis Adams
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Charles is a given name for males, and has its origins in the Common Germanic term Churl, where it originally was used to indicate a free man, but not one belonging to the nobility.
Derivations of Charles include Charlie and Chuck.
Female versions of this name include Charlotte, Lotte, Charlotta, Carolyn, Lotta and Charlene.
Charles may also refer to:
In Austrian nobility:
In Bohemian nobility:
In British nobility:
In French nobility:
In German nobility:
In Hungarian nobility:
In Spanish nobility:
In Italian nobility:
In Monaco nobility:
In Romanian nobility:
In Swedish nobility:
In other nobility: