Disagreeable Detective Work: Private Investigation in the US from the Civil War until WW2

This project tells the story of how for six decades beginning in the 1870s private detectives conducted investigations that reached into American workplaces, leisure activities, and homes. They operated as a de facto national police force, filling a gap in policing services at the state and federal level that existed until the expansion of the FBI in the 1930s. Railroad corporations hired them for investigations of train robbery, and later banks and jewelers retained them to investigate robbery, theft, and burglary, and local police and prosecutors turned to them in cases of murder, bombing, and kidnapping. Business owners employed those same detectives to conduct surveillance in workplaces and to infiltrate radical political groups and labour unions, a practice that ended only after attention from a Congressional committee in the late 1930s. Private organizations tasked investigators with locating the illegal liquor sales, gambling, and prostitution, while individuals set them to watch suspected adulterers.

This project will be the first study to bring together all the activities of private detectives so that they can shed light on each other. When taken together, they reveal personal surveillance of a far larger scale and broader scope than has been recognized. I also extend those analyses by focusing on the practices of private investigation not just its subjects.

Law in the Suburbs: Criminal and Civil Cases and Social Life in Fairfax County, 1950-1980.

This project will provide a new perspective on life in the postwar suburbs that played an increasingly influential role in US politics and culture. Scholars have emphasized strong community ties and consensus among the exclusively white residents of the first developments and then conflict and fears about crime beginning in the 1970s as the expanding suburbs became more diverse. Those analyses rely on the records of community groups, local governing bodies, property records, and local newspapers. A different source is the focus for this project, the records of state trial courts. We know almost nothing of the work of such courts before the 1980s. Both civil and criminal cases were heard in state trial courts, so they offer rich evidence of both disputes between individuals and threats to society. Who has access to the courts and is involved in the legal system also offer insights on inequality and relations between immigrants and existing white residents. This project focuses on the Fairfax Circuit Court from 1950-1980. It served Fairfax County, in northern Virginia, one of the paradigmatic suburban regions of the postwar period thanks to the presence of federal workers. Beginning in 1950, when the county was still largely rural, provides a baseline for the impact of suburbanization. Extending to 1980 encompasses both the era of exclusively white suburban residents and the first decade when immigrants appeared in the county’s population.

A companion public history project will share the digitized case files, together with guides to the legal documents found in case files (which change over time) and case narratives for a general audience (particularly genealogists). This site is being developed in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students in the course “The Fairfax Court History Project.”