 The Robert L. Heilbroner Center of Capitalism Studies and NSSR’s Historical Studies program are pleased to co-host Dartmouth Society of Fellows’ Dr. Bench Ansfield. This talk frames the 1970s wave of landlord arson in the Bronx and beyond as a critical window into late-twentieth-century transformations in racial capitalism.
Why did Black and Brown neighborhoods across the United States go up in flames in the 1970s? Popular memory confuses this conflagration with the 1960s uprisings, yet these fires were lit not for protest, but for profit, most of which flowed into the ironically named FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate.
Presented by the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and the Historical Studies program at The New School for Social Research.
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Their book, Born in Flames, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. It examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of other U.S. cities in the 1970s. Despite its massive toll—the worst-hit areas lost 80% of their housing—this history has eluded scholarly scrutiny largely because the arsons of these years were obscured by the uprisings of the 1960s. The project pulls the arson wave out of the shadows of the uprisings, situating it within the long, untold history of insurance redlining and the subsequent, misguided efforts at federal redress.
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