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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After the Last Shift . . . . Manchester
Amoskeag laid out modern Manchester, New Hampshire, to serve its mills, and for a century the bells on Canal Street set the city’s hours. In 1935 the mills went quiet. The second entry in After the Last Shift… follows the money out of the company in the 1920s, the staged… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Bent the Light
In 1853 a German immigrant opened a spectacle shop in a Rochester arcade and waited for customers who hardly came. A century later his city ground the lenses, made the film, and built the copier America worked by. Then the light moved on. What remains is smaller, stubborn, and still… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Taught America to See
In 1888 you could mail the whole camera back to Rochester and get it home reloaded, with a hundred small round prints. George Eastman’s company taught America to keep its life in pictures, then helped invent the digital camera and watched digital undo the film business. The record is harder… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 19 – Psychiatric Drugs – The Open Door
At ten in the morning on January 19, 1952, a Paris doctor gave a manic young man fifty milligrams of a drug borrowed from the operating room. Twenty days later he was ready for normal life. This is the history of psychiatric drugs: chlorpromazine, which quieted the wards; lithium, whose… More⇢
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The City That . . . . The Water Built
For more than a century, much of the West’s grain changed boats at Buffalo, and the stop made the city rich. Then the trade found other routes, the steel left, and the last of the old twenty-five-cycle current Buffalo had run on since 1896 ended in a snowstorm. What remains… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Waxed the American Floor
Samuel Curtis Johnson was nearly fifty, with a string of failed ventures behind him, when he started selling parquet floors in Racine. His customers’ question — how do we keep them? — became Johnson’s Wax, then Glo-Coat, Fibber McGee’s “Waxy,” and a Frank Lloyd Wright headquarters with a glass roof… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 18 – From Mustard Gas to a Cure
On August 27, 1942, a dying man in New Haven was injected with a classified cousin of mustard gas, and within days his tumors shrank. Ninety-six days later he was dead. This article follows chemotherapy from that ward to Sidney Farber’s children in Boston, the women cured of choriocarcinoma, the… More⇢
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After the Last Shift – 01 – Youngstown
On September 19, 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube handed reporters a press release that ended about 5,000 jobs at its Campbell Works. The first entry in After the Last Shift… walks the ground where the mill stood, weighs why it really closed, and follows the people who walked out the… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Forged the Modern World
In 1866 a visitor looked down on Pittsburgh’s smoke and called it hell with the lid taken off, nine years before Carnegie’s first steel works opened. For a generation afterward, much of the country paid for its steel as if it had come from Pittsburgh. Then the mills closed, 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.
