Howard Zinn takes us back to a newly industrialized America, the time of robber barons, tenements bursting with immigrants, and dramatic labor struggles. Zinn's colorful cast includes Vanderbilt and Carnegie, the young J. Edgar Hoover, and George Bernard Shaw, Ben Reitman, the king of the hobos; Sacco and Vanzetti, whose arrest and execution produced storms of protest around the world, and Emma Goldman, feminist, anarchist, propagandist extraordinaire.