{"product_id":"new-york-burning-isbn-9781400032266","title":"New York Burning","description":"\u003cb\u003ePULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD WINNER • A revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Vivid and provocative; [Lepore] evokes eighteenth-century New York in all its moral and physical messiness.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A historical study that is both intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible. . . . The type of book that we need to read and historians need to write, more often.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eNew York Burning\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBancroft 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven 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.“A fascinating social and political history.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Vivid and provocative; [Lepore] evokes eighteenth-century New York in all its moral and physical messiness.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid and convincing account of the ‘plot’ and its aftermath. . . . [A] sober, meticulous, balanced book.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A historical study that is both intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible. . . . The type of book that we need to read and historians need to write, more often.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Lepore] brings this terrifying period vividly to life. . . . A gripping read that shows how quickly fear spread through a city resting upon a terrible imbalance.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNewark Star-Ledger\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The most vivid and telling description of life and death in a colonial seaport yet produced by a historian. With a lacerating attention to detail, Lepore reveals the tragedies endured and inflicted in a colonial society that combined freedom and slavery in crowded towns of stark cruelty and vaunting ambitions.\"  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJILL LEPORE\u003c\/b\u003e is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker. \u003c\/i\u003eHer books include the \u003ci\u003eNew York\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e best seller \u003ci\u003eThe Secret History of Wonder Woman\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBook of Ages, \u003c\/i\u003ea finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eIce\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter ten feet of snow over Christmas, the skies cleared in January. In  the brightening sun, poor widows and orphaned children hobbled through  the snow to a house on Smith Street, across from the Black Horse  Tavern, where a charity promised \"To Feed the hungry \u0026amp; Cloath the  naked,\" or at least those \"in Real Need of Relief.\" But in February,  the fierce weather returned. \"We have now here a second Winter more  Severe than it was some Weeks past,\" Zenger's Weekly Journal reported  on February 2, the feast of Candlemas. \"The Navigation of our River is  again stopp'd by the Ice, and the poor in great want of Wood.\" At Peter  DeLancey's farm outside the city, his \"Spanish Negro\" Antonio de St.  Bendito, whose \"Feet were frozen after the first great Snow,\" was still  unable to walk. In the city, coals were passed out to the poor to help  heat their humble homes. At John Hughson's tavern, his Irish servant  girl, Mary Burton, dressed herself \"in Man's Cloaths, put on Boots, and  went with him in his Sleigh in the deep Snows of the Commons, to help  him fetch Firewood for his Family.\" At David Machado's house, in the  East Ward, his black slave Diana, driven to desperation by the ferocity  of the cold and by the hopelessness of bondage, \"took her own young  Child from her Breast, and laid it in the Cold, that it froze to  Death.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first week of February, New Yorkers stared helplessly from piers  along the East River as a boat was \"taken by a large Cake of Ice in our  Harbour, and carried by it through the Narrows, and out of sight.\"  Watchers wondered, but could not discover, what happened to the people  on board. Six more ships lay frozen in Long Island Sound, and another,  sails set, crashed against the ice, abandoned. Meanwhile, from  Charleston, South Carolina, came the shocking news that slaves had  nearly destroyed that city, burning three hundred houses to the ground.  But this turned out to have been only a rumor. On February 9, Zenger  printed a quiet retraction: \"The report of the Negroes rising was  groundless.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven while the weather worsened, there were still city pleasures to be  had. \"on Thursday, Feb. the 12th at the new Theatre in the Broad Way  will be presented a Comedy call'd the Beaux Stratagem,\" announced a  back-page ad in the New-York Weekly Journal, in the hard winter of  1741. Tickets for a box: 5 shillings; for the pit: 2 shillings and 6  pence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor those who ventured out by the light of lanterns to attend the New  York debut of George Farquhar's late Restoration comedy, it was a cold  walk down \"the Broad Way,\" a wide, straight street, paved with cobbles,  slick with snow, and thickly canopied with the overburdened, icy  branches of the beech and locust trees that lined it. The theatre lay  just across from the Bowling Green, a triangle of land at the wide base  of Broadway fenced in in 1734 \"for the Beauty \u0026amp; Ornament of the Said  Street as well as for the Recreation \u0026amp; delight of the Inhabitants.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn evening at the theatre must have been delightful distraction for  those who could scare up the shillings, and whose boots were warm  enough to keep frostbite at bay. The Beaux' Stratagem, first staged in  London in 1707, was not only George Farquhar's best play but also the  most successful comedy of the age. From its debut to the close of the  eighteenth century, it was performed in London during every season but  one; and in the 1730s alone, it was staged over a hundred times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe appeal of The Beaux' Stratagem to eighteenth-century audiences lay  chiefly in its dizzying reversal of roles and fortunes. The play tells  the tale of \"two gentlemen of broken fortunes,\" Aimwell and Archer, on  a trip to the town of Lichfield. Having spent their small inheritances  on the pleasures of London, the two friends travel from town to town,  each taking a turn at pretending to be his companion's servant in order  to help his \"master\" impress and seduce gullible country women. In  Lichfield, the ruse works well until Aimwell falls in love with  Dorinda, the wealthy daughter of Lady Bountiful, and Archer is taken  with Dorinda's married sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Intrigues abound, as  Aimwell decides to pass himself off as his elder brother, a viscount,  in hopes of securing Dorinda's hand, while a host of still sillier  characters-a dishonest innkeeper, Bonniface, and his clever daughter,  Cherry; Lady Bountiful's dim-witted son, Squire Sullen; Sullen's  dunderheaded servant, Scrub; an amorous French count; a nefarious  French priest; and a gang of particularly feckless robbers-pursue their  own schemes, stage their own impostures, and plot their own plots,  their beaux' stratagem, leading Archer to conclude at the end of Act  II, \"We're like to have as many adventures in our inn as Don Quixote  had in his.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the New Theatre on Broadway, New York's gentry-merchants,  bureaucrats, lawyers, and naval officers-paid for the box seats.  Everyone else-servants, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and a handful of  free blacks-sat in the pit. Joe, the slave of dancing master Henry  Holt, probably worked backstage. James Alexander, a Freemason, may have  walked down the aisle in procession with his brother lodge members, to  sit together in a row, as Masons liked to do. Attorney Joseph Murray,  an avid collector of English drama who happened to live more or less  across the street from the theatre, must surely have attended with his  wife, Grace, daughter of the former governor, their clothes for the  evening laid out, perhaps, by their housekeeper, Mrs. Dimmock; their  handsome house's front steps swept clean of flurrying snow by one of  the Murrays' slaves: Jack, Congo, Dido, Adam, or Caesar. Perhaps Cuba,  one of attorney John Chambers's slaves, entered the theatre quietly,  before the curtain rose, to place a warming pan beneath the skirt of  her mistress, Chambers's wife, Anna.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe playhouse on Broadway had much to offer in the way of conviviality,  but the production on the night of the twelfth was not particularly  polished; eighteenth-century New York, like the rest of the colonies,  was a theatrical backwater. A 1709 decree by the Governor's Council had  forbidden \"play acting and prize-fighting,\" and the city's first  recorded production did not take place until 1732, when another of  Farquhar's comedies, The Recruiting Officer, was performed, with \"the  Part of Worthy acted by the ingenious Mr. Thomas Hearly,\" the mayor's  barber and periwig maker. Nearly a decade later, the hairdressing  thespian was no longer available. In 1741, for the New York debut of  The Beaux' Stratagem, the part of Aimwell was \"perform'd by a Person  who never appear'd on any Stage before.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill, the crowd, coming in from the cold, must have relished  Farquhar's comedy, at once a pretzel of plot twists, a farce of love  and deceit (and of the deceitfulness of lovers), a slightly bawdy  parody of eighteenth-century courtship, and a rather bold critique of  marriage. In Act IV, after having been wooed by Aimwell and Archer,  Dorinda and Mrs. Sullen compare their suitors:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDor: . . . my lover was upon his knees to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Sul: And mine was upon his tiptoes to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDor: Mine vowed to die for me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Sul: Mine swore to die with me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDor: Mine spoke the softest moving things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Sul: Mine had his moving things too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDor: Mine kissed my hand ten thousand times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Sul: Mine has all that pleasure to come.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDor: Mine offered marriage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Sul: O Lard! d'ye call that a moving thing?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf Daniel Horsmanden attended the New Theatre on the night of February  12, he would have seen much that was familiar, uncomfortably familiar,  in Aimwell and Archer, two men on the make, willing to say anything and  to pass themselves off as wealthier than they were, plotting to marry  rich women. Horsmanden was born in England in 1694, the eldest son of  the rector of All Saints Church, in Purleigh, Essex. As a young man, he  declined to inherit his father's position and determined instead on a  legal career. In his twenties, while studying law in London, Horsmanden  pursued his own beaux' stratagem on a trip to the fashionable resort  town of Tunbridge Wells with his cousin, the Virginian William Byrd II,  a widower in his forties who was desperately seeking a marriage  alliance that might rescue him from debt. In Tunbridge Wells,  Horsmanden courted \"Miss B-n-y.\" Byrd, having recently failed to win  the hand of Miss Mary Smith (in spite of boasting of his Virginia  estate of 43,000 acres and 220 slaves), scouted about for another  suitable wife while composing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTunbrigalia, a book of poems celebrating the charms of several pretty  Englishwomen of his close acquaintance, including Horsmanden's older  sisters, Susanna (or \"Suky\") and Ursula (delightfully known as \"Nutty  Horsmanden\"):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrice happy Wells! where Beauty's in such store,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen could'st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Borrel, Lyndsey, Searle, and Thousands more?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilliam Byrd fancied himself a wit: after he and Horsmanden returned to  London, Byrd wrote a love letter for his tongue-tied cousin Daniel.  When Horsmanden told Byrd he \"was going to Tunbridge again to endeavor  to get Miss B-n-y,\" Byrd \"lent him thirty guineas for his expedition.\"  But Byrd's pen and pocketbook failed to win Horsmanden his suit. The  mysterious Miss B-n-y turned him down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the 1710s, Horsmanden and Byrd dined together, drank together,  attended the theatre together, and spent endless hours gossiping in  London taverns and coffeehouses. And they went whoring together, as is  made abundantly clear in Byrd's secret diary (written in an obscure  shorthand and kept under lock and key), in entries like the one from  June 26, 1718: \"After dinner I put some things in order and then took a  nap till 5 o'clock, when Daniel Horsmanden came and we went to the  park, where we had appointed to meet some ladies but they failed. Then  we went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them  into the arbor and ate some cold veal and about 10 o'clock we carried  them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with them all night and I  rogered mine twice and slept pretty well, but neglected my prayers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilliam Byrd neglected his prayers more than once; he was a shattered  man, compulsively rogering whores. During these painful, dissolute  years of Byrd's life, young Daniel Horsmanden was his boon companion.  By the diary's end, it's difficult not to raise an eyebrow at the  homonym in Tunbrigalia, \"When could'st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar  . . . ?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eByrd, for all his sexual bravado, was mortified by his dependence on  cheap prostitutes. He once wrote of himself, \"The struggle between the  Senate and the Plebeans in the Roman Commonwealth, or betweext the King  and the Parliament in England, was never half so violent as the Civil  war between this Hero's Principles and his Inclinations.\" Visiting  prostitutes gave Byrd nightmares. In September 1719 he confided in his  diary, \"Daniel Horsmanden came again and we went to visit a whore but  she was from home. . . . I dreamed I caused a coffin to be made for me  to bury myself in but I changed my mind.\" What gave Byrd nightmares  made Horsmanden sick. Six weeks after his first visit to a prostitute,  the young law student was confined to his lodgings with \"a sore leg.\"  After another episode, he \"had a swelled face.\" The \"leg\" might have  been a euphemism: Horsmanden may have contracted syphilis, whose  symptoms during the first two years after exposure include joint pain  and markedly swollen glands-the \"swelled face.\" In any event,  Horsmanden's own rather tortured relationship with prostitutes, whom he  tried in vain to give up, might explain why he didn't marry until 1747,  at the age of fifty-three, and never fathered any children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1720, the year after William Byrd left England for Virginia,  Horsmanden lost his fortune, what little was left of his inheritance,  in the South Sea Bubble. It was an awful blow. He continued to study at  the Inns of Court but failed to earn much of a living or to recover his  considerable South Sea losses by practicing law. He was broke.  Eventually, as Horsmanden later explained, \"I was Oblig'd to leave  England.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1729, Horsmanden bought a book entitled A New Survey of the Globe,  by Thomas Templeman. Templeman, true to an Englishman's sense of  geography, reported only two kinds of information in his curious book:  the size of landmasses and the distance of every important city in the  world from London. Horsmanden, penniless and aimless, made his own  survey of the globe, attempting to determine in what direction to head.  He studied Templeman's figures closely. Finally, he decided to sail for  Virginia, where his cousin William Byrd was a member of the Governor's  Council.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut Horsmanden failed in Virginia, too. He was unable to gain admission  to the bar, and he left after less than two years. By 1731, Daniel  Horsmanden was on his way to New York City. Miles from London: 3,471.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Have I been traversing the Ocean for so many weeks, to be sett down  again in the country I quitted?\" wondered another Englishman when he  arrived in New York. \"This cannot be a new town, in a new world, for  such must be attended with many new objects, new faces, new manners,  new customs, but here I can find nothing different from what I have  quitted.\" More than three thousand miles from London, New York struck  English visitors as uncannily familiar. \"The dress and external  appearance of the people is the same. The houses are in the stile we  are accustomed to; within doors the furniture is all English or made  after English fashions. The mode of living is the same.\" One visitor  was flustered: \"Where then shall I find any difference?\" He found only  one: \"the greater number of the Blacks.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was, of course, another difference. Compared to London, New York  was no city at all. It was only a mile long and half a mile wide. In  population, New York in 1741 was second only to Boston among colonial  cities (and neck and neck with Philadelphia), but against London it was  a hamlet. By Thomas Templeman's reckoning, \"London contains about  105,000 Houses, 840,000 Souls.\" In 1741, New York boasted more like  1,500 houses and 10,000 souls. But nearly 2,000 were the souls of black  folk, and their numbers almost always grabbed travelers' attention.  (There were probably only about 15,000 blacks in eighteenth-century  London, less than 2 percent of the population, compared to New York's  20 percent.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite how almost entirely English the city may have at first  appeared, New York was a jumble of cultures, languages, and religions.  By 1731, it even had its own synagogue, the first in Britain's  colonies. Peopled with Dutch, English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and German  settlers, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, and African slaves and  \"Spanish Negroes,\" New York was a frenzied, factious place. \"The  inhabitants of New York,\" a visiting English vicar observed, were more  than half of them Dutch and therefore \"habitually frugal, industrious,  and parsimonious,\" but the rest were of so many \"different nations,  different languages, and different religions, it is almost impossible  to give them any precise or determinate character.\"","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303397249253,"sku":"NP9781400032266","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400032266.jpg?v=1767733676","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/new-york-burning-isbn-9781400032266","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}