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[[File:Pinkertons.jpg|thumbnail|300px|left|<i>Inventing the Pinkertons</i> by S. Paul O'Hara]]
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was security guard and detective agency was created to help companies to control their employees, but during by Allan Pinkerton. After the Civil War the role the 19th Century their mission expanded Pinkertons played in America grew dramatically. They served as Abraham Lincoln's personal security during the Civil War. In the 1870s they , were contracted by the Department of Justice Federal to investigate and help prosecute anyone who violated federal law. They also in the 1870s, were intimately involved in attempting used to suppress labor strife in the 1870s and they even tracking tracked down outlaws such as Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
S. Paul O'Hara's new book <i>Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs</i> published by [https://www.press.jhu.edu/ John Hopkins University Press] attempts to separate the myth from reality and paint the real picture of the most famous private detective agency in United States history. JHU Press states O'Hara explains who "American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order." Professor Maury Klein had said that the book not only explains"the convoluted tale" of the Pinkertons, but reads "like a detective novel."