Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan.(Brief Article)(Book Review)

Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. Knopf. Aug. 2005. c.352p, illus, maps. index. ISBN 1-4000-4029-9. $26.95. HIST

Prize-winning author Lepore (history, Harvard Univ.; The Name off War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity) offers new analysis of an episode in Colonial New York that revealed the city's racism, the so-called New York Conspiracy, or Negro Plot, of 1741. At the time, New York's pluralistic white community depended upon slaves, who constituted 20 percent of the population. When ten suspicious fires broke out, one white accuser claimed that they were set by black slaves, and …