Born in Flames
The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History
Winner of the 2026 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
Winner of the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction
Winner of the 2026 Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History from the Society of American Historians
Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the New York City Book Award
Winner of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Nonfiction
Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2026 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2025
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2025
The Skipped History Podcast Best Book of the Year
“[R]evelatory…Deeply researched and masterfully told.” —Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book Review
The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color.
Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.
Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.
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Historian Ansfield debuts with a riveting and meticulous chronicle of the wave of arsons-for-profit that burned through America's cities in the 1970s. The book focuses on the Bronx, which notoriously lost around 20% of its housing stock, though Ansfield argues that the borough is "exemplary" of a lesser-known arson epidemic that devastated neighborhoods of color across the country. Dispelling the racist myth that residents set the fires themselves, the author traces the confluence of financial factors that motivated absentee landlords to burn their neglected, deteriorating properties. These factors included high-cost, low-coverage state-sponsored insurance policies that debuted following the racial uprisings of the 1960s (when insurance companies abandoned "riot-affected areas"); insurance companies' newfound practice of investing customer premiums for profit, which further inflated premiums to astronomical heights; and city budget cuts that decimated the FDNY. Ansfield shows how "the spoils of arson were manifest"—one arsonist landlord cruised the South Bronx in a pink Cadillac—and movingly conveys the "immense psychic toll" living among the fires took on tenants who, as they tracked the conflagrations' block-by-block progress, fearfully went to bed with their shoes on; some were even burned out of more than one apartment. The book also unearths the tenant-organized activism, in collaboration with local officials and even some of the insurance companies themselves, that finally ended the fires. The result is an outstanding exposé of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the "Bronx is burning" saga.
