They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History

Made famous in the 1976 documentary Harlan County USA, this pocket of Appalachian coal country has been home to generations of miners---and to some of the most bitter labor battles of the twentieth century. It has also produced a rich cultural tradition that has remained largely undiscovered by outsiders, until now.

They Say in Harlan County is not a book about coal miners so much as a dialogue in which more than 150 Harlan County women and men tell the story of Harlan County from pioneer times, through the dramatic strikes of the 1930s and '70s, to the present. Alessandro Portelli, one of the giants of oral history, draws on 25 years of original interviews to take readers into mining communities and inside the lives of those who work, suffer, and die in them---from black lung, falling rock, suffocation, or simply from work that can be literally backbreaking. The book is structured as a vivid montage of all these voices---stoic, outraged, grief-stricken, defiant---skillfully interwoven with documents from archives and the author's own participating and critical voice. Portelli uncovers the whole history and memory of the United States in this one symbolic place, through settlement, slavery, civil war, industrialization, immigration, labor conflict, technological change, environmental and social crises, and resistance.

With rare emotional immediacy, gripping narratives, and unforgettable characters, They Say in Harlan County tells the real story of a culture, the resilience of its people, and the terrible human costs of coal mining.

Alessandro Portelli is Professor of American Literature at the University of Rome-La Sapienza. He is the author of The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Form and Meaning in Oral History; The Text and the Voice: Speaking, Writing, and Democracy in American Literature; The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue; and The Order Has Already Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, which won Italy's prestigious Viareggio Book Prize.