"A young historian's superlative debut . . . this excellent book delivers the truth about 'the burning years." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[R]iveting . . . an outstanding expose of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the 'Bronx is burning' saga."--Publishers Weekly (starred 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 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. In the Bronx and across the nation, 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, inroduces the term 'brownlining' for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress"-- Dust jacket