Howard Zinn takes us back a century to a newly industrialized America, the time of robber barons & tycoons, of tenements bursting with immigrants, of dramatic and often violent labor struggles like Haymarket & Homestead.
Zinn’s cast includes Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, the young J. Edgar Hoover, Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Bernard Shaw. But his focus, as ever, is on the organizers and agitators in the worker and immigrant communities, characters as colorful as those in any novel like Ben Reitman, the king of the hobos, and Alexander Berkman, author of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists whose arrest, conviction and execution on trumped-up murder charges produced storms of protest around the world, and Emma Goldman, feminist, anarchist, propagandist extraordinaire for free love and against capitalist exploitation, for direct action and against oppression.