Gibson
Orville Gibson founded the company in 1902 as the "Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Mfg. Co. Ltd." in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to make mandolin-family instruments. Gibson invented archtop guitars by constructing the same type of carved, arched tops used on violins. By the 1930s, the company was also making flattop acoustic guitars, as well as one of the first commercially available hollow-body electric guitars, used and popularized by Charlie Christian. In 1944, Gibson was bought by Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI), which was acquired in 1969 by Panama-based conglomerate Ecuadorian Company Limited (ECL), that changed its name in the same year to Norlin Corporation. Gibson was owned by Norlin Corporation from 1969 to 1986. In 1986, the company was acquired by a group led by Henry Juszkiewicz and David H. Berryman.
Charles Gibson (historian)
Charles Gibson (12 August 1920 - 22 August 1985, Keeseville, N.Y.) was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977. He studied history at Yale University with George Kubler, and he taught for a number of years at University of Iowa before moving to University of Michigan. His dissertation on the Nahua polity of Tlaxcala (published in 1952 as "Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century"), a key ally of the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico, was the first major study of conquest and early colonial era Nahuas from the indigenous perspective. It remains a model for scholars working on Mesoamerican ethnohistory, or more simply put, history of Mexican Indians. He also contributed to the creation of important bibliographic guides to works in Mexican history, such as the "Handbook of Latin American Studies" and Mesoamerican ethnohistory as well as an index to the journal "Hispanic American Historical Review." The culmination of his work on colonial-era Nahuas is "The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810" (1964), which "reordered the research priorities for a generation of colonial historians."