America on Fire

The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

By: Elizabeth Hinton

Narrated by: Shayna Small

Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times Notable Book

Best Books of 2021: Time, Smithsonian

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A radical reckoning with the racial inequality of America’s past and present, by one of the country's leading scholars of policing and mass incarceration.

Between 1964 and 1972, the United States endured domestic violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. During these eight years, Black residents responded to police brutality and systemic racism by throwing punches and Molotov cocktails at police officers, plundering local businesses and vandalising exploitative institutions. Ever since, Americans have been living in a nation and national culture created, in part, by the extreme violence of this period.

In America on Fire, acclaimed Professor Elizabeth Hinton draws on previously untapped sources to unravel this extraordinary history for the first time, arguing that we cannot understand the civil rights struggle without coming to terms with the astonishing violence and hugely expanded policing regime that followed it. A leading scholar of policing, Hinton underlines a crucial lesson in the book - that police violence precipitates community violence - and shows how it continues to escape policy makers, who respond by further criminalising entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes.

Taking us from the uprising in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Hinton’s urgent, eye-opening and much-anticipated America on Fire offers an unprecedented framework for understanding the crisis at the country’s heart.

©2021 Elizabeth Hinton (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"An indispensable account of the devastating cycle of police violence and community violence in the United States from the 1960s to the 2020s.... Essential to any understanding of the state of the nation, and the way from here." (Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States)

"In this powerful, eye-opening book, Elizabeth Hinton reframes our understanding of the origins of the current struggle for racial justice.... No book could be more timely." (Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trial and DeWitt Clinton professor emeritus of history at Columbia University)

"If you want to understand the massive antiracist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire." (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams)