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 – The Only Black War Correspondent Writing for a Major Daily
Thomas Morris Chester took the one war-correspondent job in America that could get the reporter shot or sold into slavery. He accepted it without hesitation. The son of a fugitive slave, he became the only Black reporter for any major daily in the Civil War, embedded with the United States… More⇢
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The Eight Critical Skills: Where You Actually Learn Them
Thirty years ago, I built a list of eight critical skills—not from a survey, but from nearly a thousand executive searches where companies told me what they’d pay real money to find. The skills held. The world they were built for did not. AI changed everything underneath them. It drafts… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – The Congressional Medal of Honor and the Geometry of Mercy
A wounded man on the road. The enemy’s uniform on his back. A field of fire no order required anyone to cross. The easy thing, the sanctioned thing, was to leave him where he lay and let the war finish him. On May 2, 1863, in the burning woods of… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – The Ugliest First Amendment Case the Civil War Produced
A racist, opportunistic Copperhead congressman — arrested at 2:30 a.m. for a speech, tried by soldiers in a state where the courts sat open, convicted, and banished into the Confederacy by Lincoln himself. The worst possible man to be right about the First Amendment, and right anyway. In May 1863,… More⇢
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The Girl Beneath the Banner – A Front-Row Seat to the Moment Lincoln Made Slavery a Question of Conscience
She stood three feet from Lincoln and lived to measure the afternoon against everything it foretold. A rare eyewitness account of the 1858 Galesburg debate, written from the crowd rather than the platform. Josephine Park Cranston, a Lombard student, conceived and helped stitch a banner naming Lincoln “The Champion of… More⇢
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Old Letters – Josephine Park Cranston – Columbus, Ohio in the late 1870s
My great, great Aunt, Josephine Park Cranston, was a prolific writer. She loved writing essays and descriptions of things she greatly admired. This is a short letter about Columbus, Ohio, written in the late 1870s. Her handwriting is beautiful. More⇢
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Thirty Years On, the Eight Critical Skills Still Hold—and AI Has Honed Their Edge
You do not learn a critical skill by reading about it. You learn it by practicing it — and that was always the part worth having. Thirty years ago, I built a list of eight critical skills—not from a survey, but from nearly a thousand executive searches where companies told… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence — The Enslaved Pilot Who Stole a Confederate Warship, Steered to Freedom, and Became a Member of Congress
A stolen warship. Five Confederate forts between him and the open sea. A captain’s coat, a straw hat, and the exact signals to blow at each checkpoint — because he was the one the Confederacy had trusted to give them. That was the gamble Robert Smalls made at three in… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – The Interrogation Transcript That Outlived the Interrogators
One Lincolnshire gentlewoman. Three arrests for heresy. Both shoulders pulled from their sockets by the Lord Chancellor of England. A condemned prisoner racked illegally by two of the highest officers of the realm, with their own hands, to extract the names of the queen’s friends. Anne Askew named no one.… 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.
