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 Bench Under Siege
One Black lawyer. A bar that twice refused him. A seat on the highest court of a former slave state. And a campaign of terror outside the courthouse, riding to take that state back at gunpoint. That was the ground Jonathan Jasper Wright stood on when he became the first… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Cast the Country in Brass
A Connecticut valley with no copper or zinc of its own became the brass capital of the world. From a single horse-powered mill in 1802, Waterbury learned to roll and stamp brass better than anyone in America — the buttons on the nation’s uniforms, the works of its clocks, the… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Collared the Country
In 1827 a Troy housewife, tired of scrubbing a whole shirt to clean one collar, took her scissors to it — and started an industry. Within a lifetime this city on the Hudson made nine of every ten collars in America, named the white-collar and blue-collar worker, and sent its… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Dressed the Republic
It invented the suit you could buy off a rack and wear the same day, and it cut the soft-shouldered coat that dressed the American professional class for a hundred years. Brooks Brothers dressed forty of the nation’s presidents — and one of them, Abraham Lincoln, was wearing its coat,… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence — The Mississippi Senator Who Turned His Own Murder Into Testimony
What do you do when you cannot win? Charles Caldwell — born enslaved, blacksmith, Mississippi state senator, captain of a Black militia company — was lured into a Clinton store cellar on December 30, 1875, and shot at the clink of a Christmas toast. The bullet did not kill him… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Began America’s Factories
Every American factory has an ancestor, and it stands beside a waterfall in Rhode Island. In 1793 a young Englishman who had smuggled the secret of cotton spinning out in his memory built the first water-powered mill in the country here — seventy-two spindles that multiplied into millions and clothed… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Cleaned the American Mouth
He arrived nearly penniless and believed soap and salvation were related. William Colgate boiled his first batch on a narrow Manhattan street in 1806; ninety years later his company put toothpaste in a collapsible tube and taught a whole country to brush — alone, twice a day, from a tube… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Turned Gunpowder Into Chemistry
A French immigrant came home from a hunt in 1800 angry about his gunpowder, and two centuries later the company he built had given the country nylon, Teflon, Kevlar, and the suit that walked on the moon — and a chemical in nearly every bloodstream on earth. DuPont turned powder… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Aged America’s Patience
A German farmer with too much corn turned his surplus into whiskey — and his family spent the next seven generations teaching a restless country to wait. From a barrel-shed in 1795 to a sixteen-billion-dollar sale to Japan in 2014, Jim Beam survived Prohibition, the death of its founder, and… 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.
