Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

Finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in HistoryWinner of the 2026 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for HistoryWinner of the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in NonfictionWinner of the 2026 Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History from the Society of American HistoriansWinner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the New York City Book AwardWinner of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary AwardNominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-NonfictionFinalist for the Gotham Book PrizeShortlisted for the 2026 J. Anthony Lukas Book PrizeOne of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2025A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2025The Skipped History Podcast Best Book of the Year“[R]evelatory…Deeply researched and masterfully told.” —Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book ReviewThe 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. Read more