“Harlan County U.S.A.” depicts a labor dispute in a coal town with a violent history, where organized workers waged a 13-month strike to check the power of an industry in which employers have ...

Secondly, the report is a reminder that the dirty, dangerous mining jobs seen in “Harlan County U.S.A.” are not necessarily the mining jobs of the 21st century.

In Harlan County alone, the population has dipped below 30,000, dropping by nearly half in 30 years. Unemployment hovers around 18 percent - more than three times the national average.

Rising labor costs (Harlan operators have so far refused to sign a new U.M.W. contract under which miners would get $14.25 a day to enter a mine, 76¢ more per ton to load coal) have spurred mine ...

The 1976 documentary portrays the Brookside coal miners’ strike of 1973 in Harlan County, Kentucky. Told without narration, the film features raw footage of the miners and their families, accompanied ...

As the coal industry declined through the 1990s, poverty and unemployment soared in Harlan, with over 25 percent of the county’s population of about 25,000 falling below the poverty line.

The man then lost control and swerved into the historic coal monument in front of the Harlan County Courthouse. The monument was made in 1941 out of coal, a symbolic part of Harlan County.

I was born in 1946 and raised in a Black coal mining family at the foot of Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak, in Harlan County. From its summit, during my frequent hikes as a teenager, I ...

“I guess we’re going to be like a dying breed,” says Stevens. The son of a coal worker, he got his first mining job when he was 18 years old. Now, at 30, he’s leaving the industry.