Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency founded

Historical Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University)

Domains

Organisations and institutions (political)
Policing and Surveillance

Dates

Date of occurrence 1850

Places

United States (Location)

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

The story of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency reveals several of the underlying trends in the development of mass society in the United States. Born 25 August 1819 in Glasgow, Scotland, and dying on 1st July 1884, Allan Pinkerton began his working life as an artisan, a cooper, and became involved in his early 20s in the Chartist movement for political reform. His activities earned him a warrant for arrest and he fled Scotland in 1842 for Chicago where he set up as a cooper and by accident of fate in 1846 earned public respect by assisting in the capture of a gang of counterfeiters. Pinkerton was elected Deputy Sheriff for Cook county and the political radical thus migrated to the police. However, his stay was brief, his entrepreneurial streak being too strong. In 1850 he set up a…

312 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency founded". The Literary Encyclopedia. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=4923, accessed 25 April 2024.]

Save this article