Charles P. Kindleberger (1910-2003) was an economic historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, he worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements before serving on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1940 to 1942. After the Second World War, he became a leading architect of the Marshall Plan. He joined the economics faculty at MIT in 1948 and retired in 1976 as the Ford International Professor of Economics.