Allan Pinkerton: The Detective Who Helped Define American Intelligence

In January 1861, a Scottish immigrant named Allan Pinkerton learned of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln during his inaugural journey to Washington. Pinkerton had been hired to investigate threats to a Baltimore railroad, but the intelligence he gathered pointed toward something far more dangerous. He rerouted Lincoln’s travel, moved the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night under an assumed name, and delivered him safely to Washington. It was, in miniature, what would become the practice of American intelligence.

Pinkerton had come to the United States from Glasgow in 1842, fleeing Scotland after his involvement in Chartist political activities. He settled in Illinois, became a deputy sheriff, and in 1850 founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency with the motto “We Never Sleep.” His early cases involved railroad theft, counterfeiting, and the kind of interstate crime that local police forces were structurally unable to handle.

Book Spotlight: The Lost Dynasty

 They went from last place to dynasty in two years. Then they vanished from history—but their revolution changed sports forever.

In 1892, the Baltimore Orioles were the worst team in professional baseball: 46-101, terrible defense, no strategy, empty stands. When manager Ned Hanlon took control, he didn't just rebuild a team—he revolutionized the entire sport.

Within two years, Hanlon's Orioles had won the first of three consecutive championships through methods that were unprecedented in professional athletics. They didn't rely on raw talent or power hitting. Instead, they developed systematic approaches to every aspect of the game: the famous "Baltimore Chop," coordinated hit-and-run plays, defensive positioning based on analytical preparation, and psychological warfare that intimidated opponents before games even began.

This was the birth of "scientific baseball"—and it changed everything.

Willie Keeler's precise, situational hitting. John McGraw's aggressive tactical leadership. Hughie Jennings's defensive coordination. Together, they proved that intelligence and systematic preparation could overcome any advantage in talent or resources. Their innovations established the foundation for modern professional sports—from defensive shifts and situational strategies to sports analytics and systematic player development.

But success bred destruction.

Book Spotlight: Vicksburg

 Seven Things You Should Know

Everyone knows Gettysburg.

Almost nobody really knows Vicksburg — and that gap is worth closing, because a strong case can be made that Vicksburg, not Gettysburg, was the war's most consequential battle. It took a year of failed campaigns, a gamble that worried even Lincoln, a fleet running past enemy guns in the dark, and forty-seven days of a city living underground — but when Vicksburg finally fell, it split the Confederacy in two and handed Lincoln the general who would go on to end the war.

Seven Things You Should Know About the Battle of Vicksburg is out now — short, surprising, and worth the forty-five minutes.

When the News Needs a Little Explanation

 The headlines move fast. The context rarely keeps up.

That's the idea behind four titles from the I'm No Expert, But library that happen to line up with what's dominating the news right now: a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf, a war grinding through its third year in Eastern Europe, the fossil fuels that quietly run almost everything, and a trade policy tool that keeps showing up in headlines without much explanation of how it actually works.

Each book follows the same premise. I'm not an expert. I went looking anyway, and I came back with seven things that surprised me enough to write down.

Seven Things You Should Know About the Strait of Hormuz explains why a 21-mile-wide waterway can move oil markets and foreign policy in the same afternoon. Seven Things You Should Know About the War in Ukraine lays out the mechanics behind a conflict most of us only see in fragments. Seven Things You Should Know About Oil and Gas covers the industry that shapes gas prices, geopolitics, and a good chunk of the evening news, whether we notice it or not. Seven Things You Should Know About Tariffs untangles a word that gets thrown around constantly and understood rarely.

None of these books argue a side. They're not trying to. The goal is the same one behind every title in the series: explain the mechanism, name the disagreement where experts have one, and trust the reader to take it from there.

If the news has left you nodding along without quite following, one of these might be worth the hour (or less) it takes to read. All available on Amazon.

Strait of Hormuz: Seven Things You Should Know

War in Ukraine: Seven Things You Should Know

Oil and Gas: Seven Things You Should Know

Tariffs: Seven Things You Should Know

The League That Saved Itself: The Negro National League After Rube Foster

When Rube Foster suffered a mental breakdown in 1926 and was institutionalized, the Negro National League he had built from nothing lost the one man who had held it together by force of will. What happened next is less a story of collapse than a story of survival — and of what it takes to keep an institution alive when the person who made it work is no longer there.

Foster had been simultaneously president, arbiter, scheduler, banker, and disciplinarian of the league he’d founded in 1920. He had subsidized struggling franchises with his own money, resolved disputes through personal authority, and maintained the competitive balance that kept fans interested. Without him, the cracks that had always been present in the structure widened rapidly.

The Eastern Colored League, a rival circuit that had formed in 1923, competed with the NNL for players and fans. By 1928 the Eastern Colored League had folded. The NNL limped along until 1931, when the Great Depression delivered the blow that internal dysfunction had been setting up for five years.

The revival came in 1933, when Gus Greenlee, a Pittsburgh numbers operator with a genuine love of baseball, organized a second Negro National League. Greenlee built Greenlee Field with his own money, assembled the Pittsburgh Crawfords into one of the great teams of the era — Josh Gibson catching, Satchel Paige pitching, Judy Johnson at third base — and provided the organizational backbone the league needed.

The window myth almost everyone believes - and why it's wrong

 You've probably heard that old cathedral glass is secretly flowing downhill, thicker at the bottom after centuries of slow melting. It's a great story. It's also not true — and the real explanation is stranger than the myth.

That's chapter one of my newest book, Seven Things You Should Know About Glass — out now. Seven surprising things about a material we look through constantly and think about almost never: a Roman invention that made glass affordable overnight, a Venetian island that guarded its glassmaking secrets on pain of death, a 1952 kitchen-sink observation that changed how nearly all flat glass is made today, and the reason the entire internet runs through glass clearer than anything you've ever seen. Plus a bonus chapter on Ben Franklin's glass-powered musical instrument.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HD7N766C

As always — short, accurate, and hopefully something you're glad to know now.

This Week’s Watercolor

 

Man with a pipe

JPROF-First Inning Press newsletter

 Jim publishes a newsletter every Friday that contains a variety of articles, news about his books, and giveaways. The newsletter is free. You can sign up for it at JPROF.com.

Intercollegiate Online News Network conference set for January

The Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN) will hold its third annual conference on Jan. 13-14, 2011, in Athens, Ga.

Mark Johnson, journalism professor at the University of Georgia and faculty adviser to the GradyJournal, is the conference chair.

ICONN is an association of campus news websites that was formed at the University of Tennessee in 2008. Academic programs, campus news websites, professional organizations and individuals are welcome to join ICONN at no cost. If you are wanting to start a news website for your course or program, ICONN can help you do that with its JeffersonNet content management system.

More information can be found at the ICONN website.

Seven steps to the audio slideshow

Getting prepared for the upcoming semester, I took a shot at codifying the procedures for creating an audio slideshow. If any journalism instructors out there want to use this, they're welcome to it (credit JPROF.com).

Seven steps to the audio slideshow

JEM 200 and 230 students (and beyond)

An audio slideshow is a journalistic form that combines sound and still pictures to tell a story.

1. FORM THE IDEA

-- what’s the slideshow about; what story is being told

2. DRAFT THE SCRIPT

• two to three minutes (or as long as necessary)
• time the script (remember: 10-15 pictures per minute

3. SHOOT THE PHOTOS

• Rule No. 1: Take lots of pictures
• Long-range, midrange, close-ups
• Control the background, fill the frame, wait for moments
• Rule of thirds
• Last rule: Take lots of pictures

4. REVISE AND EDIT THE SCRIPT

(and shoot more photos)

5. Record and edit the audio (Audacity)

• narrator
• interviews
• ambient sound
• music and sound effects

6. SELECT, EDIT AND SEQUENCE THE PICTURES

• software: Picasa, iMovie, Soundslides, Animoto
• create title, credit and date slides

7. COMBINE SOUND AND PICTURES

• convert to video file
• upload (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
• breathe a sigh of relief
• tell your friends

Photo story day - JEM 200's in-class lecture assignment

Lecture assignment, March 25, 2010

Students in the JEM 200 course at the University of Tennessee were assigned to do a photo story of the lecture itself last week. Here's a short video of how the class went. Below are some of the instructions students received about the assignment.

Students,

You will be asked to begin an in-class photo assignment in lecture this week. To prepare, do the following.

• Acquire a camera and get familiar with the kind of pictures it can take -- particularly pictures indoors with reasonably good light.
• Establish an account with some picture hosting service. Recommended is Picasaweb, Google's service.
• Upload some pictures to your account so that you can get familiar with the process.
• Review JPROF's series on photojournalism, especially the part about writing cutlines.

You will be asked to take enough pictures to select 10 to 15 good ones (which means you should be taking 50 to 100 pictures, at least) and load them into an album on your hosting service. (Picasaweb is good for this because it lets you create new albums at will. Then, it can automatically make an embeddable slide show from that album.)

You will need to write cutlines for all of the pictures that go into your album, so part of your assignment will be getting cutline information. We'll talk more about that during lecture.

Your photos should include examples of long range, medium range and close-up pictures. You should have more close-up pictures than anything else.

This is a graded assignment, so do some thinking about it before you come to class. Some of the best advice you can follow are these guidelines for the student photojournalist.

Crowdsourcing the Civil War

In the video below, George Rable, University of Alabama history professor, discusses the sources of information that newspaper editors during the Civil War used for their reports about battles and the war in general.

One important source was letters from soldiers -- a form of what we could call today crowdsourcing. This means using the accounts of participants at an event to construct an account of that event.

Crowdsourcing the Civil War from Jim Stovall on Vimeo.