Name: Bench Ansfield, author of BORN IN FLAMES - an in-person Boswell event
Start: 2025-09-18T18:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-09-18T19:30:00-05:00
Location: Boswell Book Company

Bench Ansfield, author of BORN IN FLAMES - an in-person Boswell event
About this Event

Boswell Book Company presents an evening with Bench Ansfield who visits with their new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the America City.

from Boswell. Signed copies are available on most event preorders. If you have a personalization request, enter it in "order comments" at checkout. Please note: signed copies will ship AFTER the event. Remember to select “In Store Pickup” at check out to avoid unnecessary shipping fees on books you intend to pick up at the event.

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.

“A young historian’s superlative debut . . . this excellent book delivers the truth about ‘the burning years." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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.