Welcome to the Critical Skills Blog, home to over a thousand human-generated articles—never AI—on topics that matter to continuous education. To find articles of interest, use the “Search” tab. Please feel free to comment, and please subscribe. All content on this site is free.
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The Brand That . . . . Lit a Fire Across Every American Table
Edmund McIlhenny was fifty and ruined when the Civil War ended. What he did next began with five or six pepper pods handed to him by a stranger in New Orleans — a story his own family could never agree on, and one his company’s archivist has since taken apart.… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Rolled the Country Forward
Akron had no rubber tree within three thousand miles of it and made itself the Rubber Capital of the World anyway — better than a third of every rubber production worker in America at its 1929 peak. Then the work left, slowly, over sixty years, starting long before anyone in… More⇢
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The Measured Institution – Part II
Part I of The Measured Institution, “The Body Count,” followed an accounting system built in 1942 to find aircraft nobody could locate, into an attrition war where a count kept to describe the fighting became the definition of winning it. Part II follows the method into the civilian government, where… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Riveted the American Body
Levi Strauss never made a pair of pants in his life. The rivet belonged to a Reno tailor who couldn’t afford the sixty-eight-dollar patent fee, and the number 501 was a defensive product code assigned the year the monopoly ran out — for reasons nobody can recover, because the records… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 11 – She Can See Everything She Is Operating on. She Cannot Feel Any of It.
He is thirty-one minutes in and he has cut the wrong tube. In 1985 a German surgeon took out a gallbladder through a laparoscope and was told it was Mickey Mouse surgery. Six years later four American gallbladders in five were coming out the same way, and New York State… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – A Government on the Sand
A cell nine feet long and four and a half feet wide. A house burned, a store burned, a poisoning that killed the other man. Three hundred armed men around a courthouse. An offer of thirty-five thousand dollars to be quiet or leave Georgia. Tunis Campbell told the jailer to… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Glassed America
Toledo meant glass. In 1902 a former glassblower named Michael Owens built a machine that made bottles nine times faster than seven skilled men working by hand, and for most of the century that followed America drank, drove, and insulated behind what Toledo produced. Then the center moved. And when… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 10 – What the Water Told Them (MRI)
They put a needle between his vertebrae and let the oil run in, and mostly they could not get it back out. That was how you looked at a spine before magnetic resonance, and what stayed behind could scar the nerve roots for life. This is the story of Raymond… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Made the City Rise
Elisha Otis cut his own rope at the New York Crystal Palace in 1854, and almost nobody wrote it down — the most famous line in elevator history cannot be found in print until 1978. What actually built the company was a promise his son wrote out in longhand the… More⇢
Meet Your Host – Charles Cranston Jett
Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
