America on Fire

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.

'[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