NEW YORK BURNING

Pulitzer Prize Finalist and Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner

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 and more than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall. Even back in the seventeenth century, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures, communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth of the population. Exploring the political and social climate of the times, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with state intrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the white political pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear and violence. Jill Lepore, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005. Her books include "The Name of War," which won the Bancroft Prize; "New York Burning," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history; "Book of Ages," a finalist for the National Book Award; "The Secret History of Wonder Woman"; and the international best-seller "These Truths: A History of the United States." Most recently, she published her fourteenth book, "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future," in September, 2020. Lepore received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995 and is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.