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

by Bench Ansfield

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Bench Ansfield breaks down a common misconception around a chaotic time in American history through a detailed examination of housing insecurity across the globe.

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 vast majority of the 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324093510
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

"This outstanding book will change everything that we think we know about what happened to American cities in the late twentieth century. A masterpiece of history."

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

"Bench Ansfield exposes how the insurance industry, along with the federal government, collaborated and knowingly pushed my Bronx community further into poverty, despair, housing insecurity, and even death. . . . Having lived through the fires, I commend Ansfield’s dedication to excavating the truth behind systemic racism. I am profoundly grateful to them for redeeming the generations that suffered through the firestorm."

Vivian Vázquez Irizarry

"Born in Flames is a searing and incisive exploration of the intersection of race, capitalism, and urban devastation in the late 20th century. Bench Ansfield masterfully unearths the hidden histories of landlord arson and the financialization of urban space, illuminating how racial capitalism set fire to American cities. Challenging conventional narratives of urban decline, Ansfield offers a profound analysis of the way policies meant to rectify inequalities instead deepened them, and how marginalized communities fought back against the destruction. A vital contribution to understanding how the fires of the past continue to shape the injustices of the present."

Elizabeth Hinton

"Born in Flames tells a gripping story of how our cities came to be—by way of power, capital, and fire. . . . This book does what so many neglect, introducing the reader to not just the policies and power brokers, but also to the regular people of the Bronx, who revolted against the profiteers who conspired to burn their homes."

Tara Raghuveer

"Bench Ansfield has written an extraordinary history of the American city in the late twentieth century. Beautifully written and drawing on meticulous archival work, Born in Flames illuminates the economic and social logic that has led to the emergencies of our time."

Kim Phillips-Fein

"Racial inequality persists because it was insured. In this beautifully written work, Bench Ansfield is the first to uncover crucial links between the 1970s wave of urban arson and the subsequent rise of finance in the United States. One of the very few essential books on the recent history of racial capitalism in the United States, and a revelatory and unusually creative history of race and risk."

Jonathan Levy

"Born in Flames shatters the myth that Bronx residents burned their own neighborhoods in the 1970s. Bench Ansfield reveals how a ‘60s-era privatized fire insurance reform policy— redlining in disguise—fueled mass-scale landlord abandonment and arson for profit during a decade of financial crisis, not just in the Bronx but nationwide. Amid the devastation, residents led one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in U.S. history. Elegantly written and deeply researched, this groundbreaking history lays bare the roots of today’s housing crisis.”"

Johanna Fernández

"Reading like a detective novel, Born in Flames is a devastating account of how the global insurance industry, property owners, and the federal government were the real arsonists, turning the ‘creative destruction’ of black and brown neighborhoods into profit and spectacle. By seeing the world through the Bronx, Bench Ansfield upends conventional narratives of the 1970s, capitalism’s global crisis, protest politics, even the origins of hip-hop. Destined to become a classic."

Robin D. G. Kelley