Robert Campbell. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N38642]

Robert Campbell’s lengthy life bridged the transition from fur trade to modern capitalistic…

The Administration Building at the Missouri State Penitentiary, 1955. Missouri carried out executions at the penitentiary’s gas chamber from 1937 until switching to lethal injection in 1989 and moving its death row to the Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County. [Missouri State Archives/Missouri Digital Heritage, Mark Schreiber Collection, MS297_255_009]

With the exception of two years in the early twentieth century, the state of Missouri has always allowed the…

William C. Carr. Portrait by George Caleb Bingham. [Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1970.156]

William C. Carr, one of the first attorneys to practice law in Missouri, was born in…

George Washington Carver. [Courtesy of Tuskegee University Archives]

Historians have been unable to determine the exact date, or even year, of George Washington Carver’s birth.…

George Catlin posed for this portrait by English landscape artist William Fisk in 1849. [National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.70.14]

George Catlin was among the earliest Euro-American artists to paint the Indigenous peoples…

Missouri Encyclopedia logo

Celia, the property of Robert Newsom, stood trial in Fulton, Missouri, in 1855 for the murder of her master, a…

Carl Chapman at an unidentified archaeological site. [University of Missouri, Museum of Anthropology and American Archaeology Division, 23SN202-2]

Carl Haley Chapman has appropriately been called the dean of Missouri archaeology, a title…

Joseph Charless. [Thomas J. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County, vol. 2, 1883]

Joseph Charless, the first printer in St. Louis and father of journalism west of the…

Kate Chopin portrait

Kate Chopin began and ended her life in St. Louis, with an interlude as a young wife and mother in New…

Auguste Chouteau. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, 1869-001-0001]

In the early history of St. Louis and its trans-­Mississippi hinterlands, Auguste Chouteau…

Jean Pierre Chouteau Sr. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N22207]

Jean Pierre Chouteau, known as Pierre, was a pioneer settler in St. Louis and the territory that was to…

Francois M. Guyol de Guiran created this portrait of Marie Therese Bourgeois Chouteau, the “founding mother” of St. Louis, in 1810. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MHS Objects Collection, 1950-084-0002]

Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau was born in New Orleans on January 14, 1733, but she was…

Pierre Chouteau Jr. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, 1922-024-0001]

Pierre Chouteau Jr., scion of the powerful early St. Louis family and the most influential…

Cyprian Clamorgan’s The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MHS Library, Lib197-00001]

The grandson of Jacques Clamorgan, Cyprian Clamorgan wrote The Colored Aristocracy of St.…

Note of Jacques Clamorgan agreeing to pay skins worth $153 to Pierre Chouteau on July 19, 1807. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Clamorgan Family Papers, A0288-00017]

Jacques Phillippe Clamorgan arrived on the Missouri frontier in the early 1780s and spent the rest of his…

Anna Clapp portrait

Anna Lansing Clapp, president of the Ladies’ Union Aid Society (LUAS) of St. Louis, was born on August 28, 1814, at…

Peter Humphries Clark. [Wendell P. Dabney, Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens, 1926]

Peter Humphries Clark provided leadership for African American communities in St. Louis and Cincinnati, Ohio…

Portrait of William Clark by Charles Willson Peale, c. 1807–1809. [Courtesy of the Independence National Historical Park]

William Clark, the celebrated explorer who joined Meriwether Lewis in leading an overland…

Arthur Holly Compton. [University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-01878]

Arthur Holly Compton earned international recognition for his research in X-rays, sharing the 1927 Nobel Prize for…

Adaline Couzins portrait

Adaline Weston Couzins, a volunteer nursing escort and relief worker during the Civil War, was born in Brighton,…

Phoebe Couzins portrait

Phoebe Wilson Couzins, a lawyer and suffragist, was born on September 8, 1842, to John Edward Decker and…

Howard A. Cowden (right) with former president Harry S. Truman. [Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, 64-1411]

The founder of the Consumers Cooperative Association (CCA) and the original field man for…

Oliver Cromwell Cox as he appeared in Lincoln University’s yearbook in 1962. [The Archives, Lincoln University, 1962]

Oliver Cromwell Cox was arguably one of the most controversial mid-twentieth-century social…