Charles Howard McIlwain (March 15, 1871 – June 1, 1968) was an American historian and political scientist.

[1] Though McIlwain remained interested in law through his life, he quickly abandoned his legal career.

[2] In 1898 he received a master's degree from Princeton University,[3] and began teaching Latin and history and coaching track and field at The Kiski School in Saltsburg.

[5] McIlwain remained at Princeton until 1910, when he left[6] to become the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of History and Political Science[7] at Bowdoin College.

There he published his first book, The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy,[8] which caught the attention of fellow historians and led to his appointment[2] in 1911 as an assistant professor of history at Harvard.

In 1918 he edited a collection of political treatises and speeches of James VI and I, the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

[9] During 1944 McIlwain served as the George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford, the first person named to that post since the start of World War II.