As Canada's central depot and naval dockyard on the Great Lakes early in the War of 1812, the capital frontier town of York (present-day Toronto) was a prime target for American forces. In April 1813 a squadron of warships under U.S. Commodore Isaac Chauncey sailed up Lake Ontario and landed about 1,800 soldiers there as the renowned explorer Gen. Zebulon Pike led his men into battle. Though the Americans took the town, their victory proved disappointing. Malcomson challenges conventional ideas about the battle as he brings to life the politicians, soldiers, and citizens whose destinies clashed at York.

Fires are significant to study due to the immense change they brought to urban life which make it possible to trace the policies, approaches, and regulations of the city rulers. When it comes to fires in the 18th century Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire's responsibility to return the city to pre-fire conditions, and bring normalcy to city life played a crucial role. This study is an inquiry into the Ottomans' perception of fires and urban regulations. Analyzing official sources, such as court records and archival sources, this study aims to understand the Ottomans' role and mindset toward the city reconstruction after fires. Also, by cross-checking official with non-official sources, i.e. traveler accounts, the reports of diplomats (official, non-Ottoman records), drawings and secondary sources, this study provides a broader picture on the manner in which the Ottomans dealt with the outcome of fires in the capital.

Other cities have burned, but not as frequently or disastrously as London. To understand the impact and impetus fires have had on history, London is a good example. Its early growth as a trading centre led to warehouses packed with combustible merchandise. If trade followed the flag, then fire followed trade.

The colonial experience of Americans was not one long march toward independence. Sixteen hundred seventy-six was a cataclysmic year of Indian insurrection and civil war in America, when the colonies lost their "autonomy" after King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion. Stephen Webb makes clear how the forces unleashed in 1676 revolutionized the relationships between the adolescent colonies, the imperial government in London, and the embattled Algonquin and Iroquois Indians, and shows how the political institutions that evolved in the colonies in the next three hundred years reflected this experience.

This well-informed and deeply personal account analyzes bushfires from various angles and examines the possibility of limiting their disastrous effects. With fires being a constant and ongoing part of Australian history, ecology, and culture, this study shows that, despite repeated disasters throughout the last two centuries, surviving bushfires today has become no easier than during the first European settlements. With rigorous factual research, this record outlines Australia’s significant fires and discusses the aftermath of each. Topics also include climate change, arson, fire behavior, firefighting strategies, and the psychology of survival.

Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late imperial Russia, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive study. Destroying almost three billion rubles’ worth of property in European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted as a brake on Russia’s economic development while subjecting peasants to perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who came to perceived it as a key obstacle to Russia’s becoming a modern society in the European model. Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of "self-help" law or plain spite. Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern world. Fire insurance, building codes, "scientific" village layouts, and volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing the number of fires each year. More than anything else, this history of fire and arson in rural European Russia is a history of their cultural meanings in the late imperial campaign for modernity. Frierson shows the special associations of women with fire in rural life and in elite understanding of fire in the Russian countryside. Her study of the fire question demonstrates both peasant agency in fighting fire and educated Russians' hardening conviction that peasants stood in the way of Russia's advent into the company of prosperous, rational, civilized nations.