Drawn from his New York Times bestseller A People's History of the United States , Howard Zinn's The Other Civil War offers the historian and activist's view of the social and civil background of the American Civil War—a view that is rarely provided in standard historical texts. This set of essays recounts the history of American labor, free and not free, in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Zinn offers an alternative yet necessary account of the terrible nation-defining epoch.