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.