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 – 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⇢
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The Measured Institution
In 1942 the Army Air Forces did not know how many airplanes it owned. The men who fixed that problem built something real — a statistical system that found lost aircraft, cut abort rates, and brought bomber crews home. Twenty-three years later the same method was measuring a war by… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – The Massacre He Refused to Start
Five hundred and nine rifles. Seven militia companies, five of them Black. A president at the seashore who would not send troops. Armed men in every county who had already put in writing what they meant to do when the shooting started. Adelbert Ames put the rifles in a depot… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Built the Fleet
Collis Huntington ran a railroad to the mouth of the James because coal that never reaches salt water is only rock — then built a dry dock to mend the colliers, and a city grew around it. Newport News had 4,449 people in 1890 and 19,635 ten years later. A… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 07 – She won her case three times over and kept her name.
She kept her drawings for two and a half years, dated her work, saved the wooden parts, photographed the model, and could produce men who would swear the machine was hers before they touched it. That discipline won her the case. It has since been replaced by a courtroom scene… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 09 – Hounsfield, Cormack, and the Cost of Seeing Everything
To find out whether she had a brain tumor, they drained the fluid from around her brain, pumped in air, and turned her upside down in a chair. The headache lasted a week. The answer was a maybe. That was the best neurology had, and it is what the CT… 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.
