America on Fire

‘[A] groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America … America on Fire is more than a brilliant guided tour through our nation’s morally ruinous past. It reveals the deep roots of the current movement to reject a system of law enforcement that defines as the problem the very people who continue to seek to liberate themselves from racial oppression.’Peniel E. Joseph, New York Times

‘Hinton compiles a breathtaking list of more than a thousand uprisings, far beyond those with which we are most familiar … Hinton is not just recovering Black resistance; she is also exposing a long, and ignored, history of white political violence, used to maintain the subordinated status of Black communities … Hinton systematically unravels the failures of police reform’Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, The New Yorker

‘Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system … Hinton tells this story with clarity, and her conclusions should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers’Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Washington Post

‘[A] trenchant study … Illustrate[s] the origins and legacies of the rebellions that sprang from police incursions in Black life’Boston Globe

‘Hinton’s passionate, occasionally gritty approach is the opposite of a gauzy PBS series: she drills down into the granular, highlighting the courageous men and women who stood tall in a hail of bullets.’Oprah Daily, ‘Best Books to Pick Up This May’

‘Indispensable … Essential to any understanding of the state of the nation, and the way from here.’Jill Lepore, bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States

Elizabeth Hinton is an associate professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Author of the critically-acclaimed From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.