Born in Flames is available to purchase at Bookshop.org.
Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City tackles the mystery of the wave of arsons in 1970’s New York City with the curiosity of an avid detective, and comes away with an elegant social, economic and political analysis. Ansfield shows how federal fire insurance created a perverse incentive for landlords to burn buildings, part of the predatory economy breaking down Black and Brown communities in this era. Written with verve and confidence, Ansfield animates Born in Flame’s structural explanation with rich human stories from fire victims and local students, activists and artists, cultural interpreters and even the incendiary “torches” themselves.
Ansfield’s mobile prose drives home a thesis that encompasses both history’s unintended consequences and society’s underlying biases. This refined balance turns the potentially dry subject of fire insurance history into a searing account of government carelessness and urban greed, cultural blame and human disaster.
Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. They are a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, they were an ACLS and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and an American Democracy Fellow at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Their dissertation also won the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins prize in 2022, making them the second historian ever to win the Nevins and Parkman Prize for the same project, following Willie Lee Rose for her 1962 dissertation and 1965 book, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment.