Bronx Research: Books

A wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the most destructive 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," to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them.

Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City--some six thousand miles--to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows. Later, he re-walked most of the Bronx to create this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city's northern borough, from Mott Haven to City Island.
**Click the title above to watch the Jan. 29, 2024 book talk webinar about the book.

Now, in this first single-volume account of the northern borough published for the general reader since 1912, The Bronx emerges as a vital part of the development of New York City and as the story of the United States in microcosm.