New York Burning Summary

New York Burning, the award-winning book by Jill Lepore takes place in the mid-eighteenth century of New York City’s, Manhattan during a period where around 20% of the residents were enslaved. The book focuses primarily on the slave rebellion of 1741 and the vicious retaliation that had occurred at the time. However, the events that occurred in 1741 were quite unique seeing as there were plots to which around 200 people were involved. They wanted to take revenge on the towns people and murder its white inhabitants. Lepore does a great job, illustrating and bringing to light a large forgotten part of the city’s past.

The book took some massive turns and at some points had my stomach churning when reading about how people were burned at the stake in the Salem witchcraft trials, how its barely transformed from its days as New Amsterdam, and people frightened, overreacting with bloody retribution. From fires blazing in the winter of 1741 to a slave uprising this story is not one to be taken lightly. From Lepore showing us the crazy planners of a plot to burn the city? Or was it something in between, where thieves and thugs can also be the keepers of ancient rites from a distant homeland, where the world is turned upside down? …show more content…
she used a lot of tools that social historians used, such as censuses, city directories, tax lists and maps. She used these maps to try and rebuild the 18th century Manhattan from the ground up and find out as much as she could about these men and women who confessed. She took the confessions and treated them as if they were true in order to reconstruct the entire conspiracy and story itself. It felt as if Lepore was taking me and leading me through the dirty streets of lower Manhattan in 1741, like I could almost see the faces of the victims of a horrible