New York Burning

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD WINNER • A revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.

“Vivid and provocative; [Lepore] evokes eighteenth-century New York in all its moral and physical messiness.” —The New Yorker

“A historical study that is both intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible. . . . The type of book that we need to read and historians need to write, more often.” —Newsday

In New York Burning, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore recounts these dramatic events of 1741, when ten fires blazed across Manhattan and panicked whites suspecting it to be the work a slave uprising went on a rampage. In the end, thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen were hanged… Keep Reading