“I don’t want a major city to catch fire”

Via Yale University Press, Prof. Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College blogs:

When you write a book, you have to promote it. When you promote a book, they ask you to pitch ideas to news outlets. When you pitch an idea to a news outlet, they say you should have a “hook” that relates to contemporary events.

I do not want there to be a hook for my book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, because I don’t want a major city to catch fire.

My book is about an awful disaster—a fire on September 21, 1776, that burned about a fifth of New York City, which was then the second-largest town in the rebelling colonies that became the United States. I think the evidence shows that American rebels burned the city deliberately—and perhaps with George Washington’s blessing. The British had just occupied New York six days earlier, and the Americans had talked about depriving the British of headquarters for the winter. After the fire, however, the rebels insisted that Washington and his men had nothing to do with the fire, and they launched a campaign of correspondence and newspaper items to counteract any suggestion that the Americans were to blame. They succeeded, too: for years, most historians said the fire was either an accident or a mystery.

Our world is currently filled with destructive warfare, climate disaster, and disinformation. It shouldn’t be too difficult for me to connect a tragic event from the past to the catastrophes we face today. But I keep hoping the world won’t give me a hook.

As in Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Ben Carp spent part of his time researching this book digging below the standard history of this famous event to find early clues about which individuals were responsible.

The Tea Party was carefully controlled destruction while the New York fire was supposed to get out of control. The men who destroyed the tea were Boston Whigs no doubt selected for their reliability. Interestingly, some of the figures whom this book links to the Manhattan arson were people from well outside the American power structure, yet willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause.