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United States in 1848, went to work at 12 as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, then became a messenger in a telegraph office two years later. He worked his way up to private secretary and personal telegrapher for the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company in 1853. Within a very few years, he rose to superintendent of the railroad’s Pittsburgh Division. Through shrewd investment he came to control what became the Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to United States Steel for $250,000,000 in 1901. Arguing that it was the duty of the wealthy to improve society, Carnegie used his enormous wealth to endow educational and other foundations, including a program to build and stock libraries in cities and towns across America.

Carrier, Willis H. (1876–1950) While working as an engineer for the the Buffalo Forge Company in 1902, Carrier invented a system that simultaneously controlled temperature and humidity. He explained the theory behind his system in a 1911 technical paper, “Rational Psychrometric Formulae,” which marked the birth of modern air conditioning, and his company, Carrier Corporation, founded in 1915, was the first manufacturer of the equipment. Air conditioning made it possible to work in all climates and proved essential to many precision manufacturing processes.

Carson, Kit (1809–1868) Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson was born near Richmond, Kentucky, and grew up in Missouri. At 16, he joined a Santa Fe trading caravan and from 1827 to 1842 lived in the Rockies as a fur trapper and mountain man. In 1842, he served as a military guide in Oregon and California and, during the Mexican War, was a courier. After the war, Carson settled in Taos, New Mexico, where he served from 1853 to 1861 as Indian agent to the Utes. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Carson became colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry and fought Confederates as well as Apaches and Navajos. Earning a national reputation as an Indian fighter, Carson was nevertheless an impassioned advocate for the rights of Native Americans.

Carson, Rachel (1907–1964) Carson’s dramatic and elegiac Silent Spring (1962) made the American public aware of the dangers of widespread pesticide use and is frequently cited as the popular manifesto that launched the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Federal legislation restricting the use of DDT and other pesticides had its origin in her book.

Carter, Jimmy (1924–) James Earl Carter, Jr. (Jimmy) Carter was a liberal Georgia politician who entered the White House in 1977, inheriting a severe economic recession from Presidents Nixon and Ford, then leading the country through an energy crisis, which included gasoline shortages. Added to the president’s problems was the Iran hostage crisis, which began on November 4, 1979, and did not end until Carter left office. Despite such foreign affairs triumphs as brokering the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and an array of domestic initiatives, Carter’s presidency was widely perceived as a failure, and he was not elected to a second term, losing to Ronald Reagan in a landslide vote in 1980. After leaving office, he began working on behalf of human rights and other causes. His diplomatic efforts earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.

Carver, George Washington (1861?–1943) Born a slave, Carver worked odd jobs while he obtained two college degrees and became the director of the department of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute in 1896. He spent the rest of his life at this pioneering African-American institution doing agricultural research, which resulted in finding new uses for the peanut (including peanut butter and a host of manufactured goods) and the soybean. By expanding southern agriculture beyond cotton, Carver’s work was a boon to white as well as black southern farmers.

Cash, Johnny (1932–2003) Cash achieved early fame as a Country and Western singer-songwriter beginning in the mid 1950s and overcame drug addiction to bring this genre to a new height with his “Man in Black” persona, which celebrated