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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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⇢
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Quietism – The Forgetfulness of Citizens in a Republic
In 1795 Thomas Jefferson watched a country that had burned John Jay in effigy simply stop caring, and named what he saw: the quietism into which people fall after first sensations are over. A republic, he warned, does not lose an argument — it loses interest. Two centuries of evidence… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 04 – The Monogram in the Leaves
She was among the first women on earth licensed to practice architecture — and she drew the images that carried Frank Lloyd Wright to Europe and changed modern design. The visual style the world calls “Wright,” the linework and the landscapes and the Japanese-print grace: substantially hers. When Wright fled… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 04 – The Cost of Clean
They celebrated the pus. In the Victorian operating ward, the thick matter that rose in a wound had a name — laudable pus — and surgeons welcomed it as healing, while their patients died three weeks after the knife. In 1867 Joseph Lister read Pasteur, made a leap the Frenchman… More⇢
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In the Arena – Ignaz Semmelweis – He Was Right and That Was Not Enough
n Vienna in 1846, one maternity ward was three times as deadly as the ward beside it — and the mothers knew. Some gave birth in the street rather than be sent to the doctors. Ignaz Semmelweis found the reason: the doctors themselves were carrying death from the dead house… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 03 – The Idea That Remade Medicine
A nineteenth-century surgeon’s coat was black so the stains would not show, and he wore it stiff with the dried filth of a hundred past patients — proudly, as a badge of experience, never knowing it carried death from one body to the next. The history of germ theory is… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 03 – The Manifesto in His Collected Works
She chose her own name as an act of theory — folding her mother’s surname into her own because a woman erased into her husband’s line was a woman erased. Then, around 1907, she wrote the first great structural critique of patriarchy in Chinese thought: that the oppression of women… 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.
