NYC: "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions." 3/8: The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution by Benjamin L. Carp
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Great-New-York-Fire-1776/dp/0300246951
New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground.
This is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
1776 BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is CBS I on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Benjamin |
| 0:27.3 | El-Kar for Brooklyn College. We're looking at his new book, The Great New York Fire |
| 0:32.0 | of 1776, a lost story of the American Revolution. |
| 0:37.2 | We come to the moment that begins the puzzlement about who and when and how accident or design. Whitehall |
| 0:46.6 | Slip around 9 p.m. that night is the memory. Now the town is depopulated but their eyes everywhere when you pull all the |
| 0:56.0 | investigations together. Professor, as I understand it, one version is there |
| 1:02.2 | is a party that is drinking heavily at a tavern and they |
| 1:07.8 | may or may not have deliberately started a fire in a pile of lumber. They were |
| 1:11.7 | women involved, women present, possibly Demi Mondanes, unclear. It's not clear whether |
| 1:18.4 | they're soldiers or whether these are elderly people. What do we know about that incident at 9 p.m? |
| 1:24.0 | Yeah, we only know of a couple of witnesses to this who don't testify until |
| 1:29.6 | much later in 1783 and And yeah, I mean, it could well be that they didn't start it on purpose, |
| 1:36.4 | but just that they were careless because they'd been drinking, |
| 1:39.2 | they left a candle without blowing it out, |
| 1:41.6 | it caught on something dry or flammable and that the whole |
| 1:45.6 | thing had begun there at Whitehall Slip. |
| 1:48.2 | That is definitely a story that has been told over the years and it's a story that favors the American version because it's |
| 1:56.7 | it's just an accidental circumstance in the midst of the chaos and war of war. It points to British |
| 2:02.1 | carelessness. It points to accidental circumstances, it's not something |
| 2:06.7 | that lays any blame on the rebel army or their associates at all. |
| 2:10.9 | 9 PM, that's important. More like midnight. It's possible that the party was |
| 2:16.5 | witnessed at 9 PM and then people went to bed, but the fire is said to start by most accounts |
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