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Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs - Being a story of the nation's most famous (and infamous) detective agency (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R861
Discovery Miles 8 610
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Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs - Being a story of the nation's most famous (and infamous) detective agency (Hardcover)
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R881
Discovery Miles: 8 810
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Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was at
the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor,
bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed
that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal
conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital's
tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton
detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels,
reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a
particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons
examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in
the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S.
Paul O'Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to
reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way
to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly
wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction,
Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild
West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army
in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers
of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became
armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from
angry strikers. O'Hara argues that American capitalists used the
Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political
order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and
working communities a villain against which to frame their
resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the
Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American
capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.
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