On Fire Talk: The Fires Last Time: Landlord Arson and the Reverb of Racial Capitalism

This year’s wildfires in L.A. 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 FAIR plan is the byproduct of a very different conflagration: the Watts uprising of 1965. The strange career of the FAIR plan illustrates the 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. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, was published by W. W. Norton in August 2025, and recently named an Editors’ Pick by the New York Times. 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.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s On Fire series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment