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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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 It has since been replaced by a courtroom scene… More⇢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⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 08 – The Heart’s First Handwriting, and the Cost of Being Legible
The tracing takes ten seconds now, and the machine prints its own opinion across the top before any physician looks. It began with six hundred pounds of iron in a Leiden laboratory, a quartz thread finer than a hair, and a patient sitting with both hands and one foot in… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Stitched the American Home Together
A sewing machine cost a hundred and twenty-five dollars in the 1850s, when an American family’s whole year came to about five hundred. Isaac Singer built the machine that worked — eleven days of redesign on another man’s bench — but it was his partner Edward Clark who made it… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – If There Were an Election Tomorrow
Five thousand dollars to change parties. Twenty-five hundred just to give up the seat. Sixty-five men at his door two nights later. Three hours in the woods. A gun raised at his little girl, who had never been sick a day and was dead inside the year. Abram Colby refused… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Recorded America’s Voice
Camden, New Jersey made the discs, the machines, and the little dog listening to the horn — for a time the most recognized trademark on earth. By 1920 more than thirteen thousand people worked across thirty-eight buildings on its waterfront, the largest record factory complex in the world. Then radio… More⇢
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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⇢
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.
