American History Tellers Wondery

In the early 1850s, Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton stumbled upon a counterfeiting operation while gathering wood for his barrel-making business. After helping the authorities arrest the criminals, he was inspired to form a detective agency, to chase bank robbers and train bandits. His business grew quickly and in 1861 he was enlisted to prevent an attempted assassination of President Lincoln. 




The Pinkerton Detective Agency soon established itself as America’s most innovative and aggressive private police force, spying for the Union during the Civil War, and sending agents out to hunt the nation’s most notorious Wild West outlaws.




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In the mid-1870s the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s fame was growing, and founder Allan Pinkerton began to pen bestselling books that promoted his and the agency’s crime-fighting image even more. But after Pinkerton died in 1884, his sons took over and expanded the business, providing guards and watchmen to protect railroads, mines, and factories. By the early 1900s, Pinkertons had become feared labor spies and strike-busters. It wasn’t long before their brutal and deadly methods began to attract scrutiny from the press and federal regulators.




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By the late 1800s, the Pinkerton Detective Agency faced public criticism for their anti-labor practices. So the company pivoted, sending Pinkerton detectives out to do what they did best, traveling throughout the west in search of the nation’s most audacious and elusive bank-robbing desperados. 

In time, the Pinkertons also faced competition from a new Federal crime-fighting bureau, and one of their operatives would draw on his experience to write some of the most iconic detective novels in the English language.




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Allan Pinkerton started the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to catch robbers, counterfeiters and spies. For a time, Pinkerton detectives enjoyed their good image, carefully crafted by Pinkerton himself. But, that image tarnished as the Pinkertons increasingly took on paid work breaking up strikes for Gilded Age industrialists. Today, Lindsay is joined by S. Paul O’Hara, an Associate Professor of History at Xavier University, to discuss Allan Pinkerton’s determination to build the company brand and cultivate his own mythology. O’Hara is the author of, Inventing the Pinkertons.


Pre-order your copy of the new American History Tellers book, The Hidden History of the White House, for behind-the-scenes stories of some of the most dramatic events in American history—set right inside the house where it happened.

May 13th 1981: Pope John Paul II is shot in a mysterious assassination plot with potential ties to the KGB.




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In June 1914, a gunman assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This event set off a chain reaction that plunged Europe’s major powers, and the wider world, into all-out war. President Woodrow Wilson was determined to keep the United States out of the conflict, but when German submarine attacks put American lives at risk, the American people would become divided over how to respond to the increasing threat

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