David Conrad-Pérez - "Fire in the Heart of the City" - Bill Ayers
David Conrad-Pérez will discuss Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity. He will be joined in conversation by Bill Ayers. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. RSVP HERE About the book: In American history, few tragedies have been as consequential―and as enduringly misunderstood―as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Long remembered as a turning point in the struggle for labor protections, Fire in the Heart of the City shows how the fire also helped transform another cornerstone of modern American life: the rise of modern charity. Set in early twentieth-century New York, the book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when a catastrophic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, into a momentous struggle over who should organize the city's response: a rising charity sector led by wealthy financiers and civic elites, or the reform-minded unions and activists of Lower Manhattan. Drawing on newly released archival documents, interviews with the descendants of Times publisher Adolph Ochs and New York labor organizers, previously confidential reports, and long-overlooked private diaries and correspondence, historian and former journalist David Conrad-Pérez offers a striking new account of the disaster and its aftermath. He shows how a handful of charities on the brink of irrelevance were suddenly recast as New York's best answer to the social and economic conditions the fire laid bare―a watershed moment in the rise of modern charity and elite authority over social welfare in the United States. A deeply researched and absorbing work of narrative history, Fire in the Heart of the City offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most important urban disasters in American history, revealing how a single catastrophe helped reshape not only the politics of labor, but also the moral and institutional foundations of modern American charity. About the author: David Conrad-Pérez is a historian and former journalist whose work examines the forces that shape the media, philanthropy, and public life. He serves as research director for the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University. A former producer for On the Media and Public Radio International’s The World, he has also written for the New York Times, Reuters, and Columbia Journalism Review. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. About the interlocutor: Bill Ayers is a social justice activist, teacher, Distinguished Professor of Education (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy.
