Allan Pinkerton

Guest: Paul O’Hara, Associate Professor, History, Xavier University, and author, "Inventing the Pinkertons; Or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being a story of the nation’s most famous (and infamous) detective agency"

Who was the man behind the Pinkerton National Detective Agency? And how did he come to offer a for-rent militia that pushed the boundaries of policing?

 

Murder in Miniature: How Dollhouses Led to the Birth of Modern Forensics

Guest: Bruce Goldfarb, Executive Assistant for the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland: curator of "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," and author, “18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics”

Frances Glessner Lee worked tirelessly to create 20 crime scene dioramas that recreated 20 real homicide cases that were hard to crack. She used these dioramas to help teach investigators how to gather the most pertinant details at a crime scene. Through her work she became the mother of modern forensic science. Eighteen of these dioramas are still used to teach about forensic science today.