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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The Measured Institution – Part I
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 It has since been replaced by a courtroom scene… More⇢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⇢
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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⇢
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.
