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 – 07 – Röntgen, the First Look Inside, and the Bill That Came Due Later
In December 1895 a woman in Würzburg held her left hand still for fifteen minutes while her husband ran a tube, and when the plate came up she saw her own bones and her wedding ring hanging among them. Within a year the X-ray was ordinary medicine. Within that same… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 06 – To Arm the Body
On the fourteenth of May, 1796, a Gloucestershire doctor made two scratches in an eight-year-old boy’s arm, and smallpox began to lose. Ninety years later Louis Pasteur turned that single lucky accident of nature into a method that could be aimed at any disease. This is the history of vaccination… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – The Witness Who Lived
More than fifty Black survivors of the Colfax Massacre testified in federal court. Three killers were convicted. None served a day. Levi Nelson was shot through the neck at midnight, lay all night among the dead, and crawled off the field. Ten months later he walked into a courtroom in… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 06 – The Man Who Finished Her Sentences
Two versions of an unfinished novel, six days in the mud. A hundred pages damaged, illegible, destroyed. A dead woman of twenty-seven, and one man holding everything she left behind. Isabelle Eberhardt rode the Sahara in men’s clothes and wrote Algeria from inside its rooms — the garrisons, the zawiyas,… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Carried America’s Wallet Across the World
In 1850 three rival freight men merged their wagons in Buffalo rather than destroy each other. The company they built lost its founding business to the government in 1918, nearly lost itself to Chase in 1929, and nearly died of seawater in 1963 — and each time the name survived,… More⇢
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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⇢
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.
