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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How Healthcare Changed – 05 – Cholera and the Birth of Epidemiology
In the late summer of 1854, cholera tore through Soho, and a physician named John Snow walked the streets asking the dead one question: where did you get your water? Before germ theory was proven, before anyone had seen the organism, Snow mapped the deaths, traced them to the Broad… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 05 – India’s First Female Press Photographer – They Printed as M.J.V.
India’s first woman press photographer. The visual chronicler of a nation being born — Gandhi’s funeral, Mountbatten, the flag at the Red Fort, the Nehru the country still pictures. And for the earliest years of that career, the wrong name on the work. Her early Bombay photographs went out under… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Chemicaled America
In 1802 a French refugee bought ninety-five acres of fast water above Wilmington and started making gunpowder. Two centuries later the company he founded had given the world neoprene, nylon and Teflon — and had drawn up the plutonium works for the Manhattan Project in an office building at Tenth… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Burned to Build
Scranton was built to make the thing other cities were built with. Two brothers came up the Lackawanna valley in 1839 to smelt iron with hard anthracite coal, learned to roll the first American T-rails, and a city rose from a five-house hollow. Then the coal made it large: at… More⇢
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The Box in the Closet
Every family has the box of unlabeled photographs — faces nobody can name, because the people who knew are gone. Nothing was wrong. Nobody decided anything. The visit simply never got scheduled. The grandchild has decades to ask. The parent, who controls the gate, has a few. The grandparent has… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Measured and Built America
New Britain, Connecticut had no river worth damming — so in 1843 Frederick Trent Stanley put a steam engine in a bolt shop and made hardware anyway. The name went on the plane, the level, the folding rule, and eventually on a yellow steel tape in nearly every pocket in… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – He Turned the Law on His Own
A New Hampshire lawyer who moved south and bought human beings. A man who opposed secession and then enlisted anyway, at forty-three, when nobody was asking him to. A former Confederate handed the brand-new Department of Justice. That was Amos T. Akerman in the summer of 1870. He read the… More⇢
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Dirty Politics? That’s Nothing New . . . .
We are told daily that American politics has hit an unprecedented low. The record says otherwise. In 1791, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson put a poet on the government payroll to edit a newspaper attacking the administration he served — and dirty politics has been standard equipment ever since: the… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Beamed the Sky
For nineteen years, one company in America could roll the wide-flange beam — and it was not in Pittsburgh. It was in a town founded on Christmas Eve by pacifists who did not believe in war, and which became the arsenal of the American century. Bethlehem’s steel stands in the… More⇢
Meet Your Host – Charlie Jett
Charles C. 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.
