Racial Capitalism in the Burning Years

Join us for an insightful lecture by Bench Ansfield, part of our Western History Lecture Series. 

This year's devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have turned a spotlight on a corner of the insurance world that typically exists in the shadows: the California FAIR plan, the state's insurer of last resort. Though it is now synonymous with wildfire risk, the California FAIR plan is the byproduct of a very different conflagration that hit Los Angeles sixty years ago: the Watts uprising of 1965. 

The strange career of the FAIR plan illustrates the indelible links between the urban crisis of the late twentieth century and the climate crisis of the present. Connecting the long hot summers of the 1960s to today's wildfires was a wave of insurance arson that coursed through the Bronx, L.A., and scores of American cities during the 1970s. This talk frames that decade's arson wave as a critical window into late-twentieth-century transformations in racial capitalism.

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, will be published by W. W. Norton in August 2025. It examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of other U.S. cities in the 1970s.