Virginia

“Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s -- Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Frank "Jelly" Nash -- were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers -- women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music -- did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.

And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land