• Introduction: Harlan County, 1964-2007: A love story


• Chapter 1: The Bear and the Sycamore Tree


• Chapter 2: Of Hardship and Love


• Chapter 3: Wars and Peace


• Chapter 4: These Signs Shall Follow Them


• Chapter 5: Flush Times and Rough Times


• Chapter 6: A Space of Their Own


• Chapter 7: Miner's Life


• Chapter 8: Identities


• Chapter 9: No Neutrals there


• Chapter 10: God, Guns, and Guts


• Chapter 11: Harlan on Our Minds


• Chapter 12: Exodus


• Chapter 13: The Other America


• Chapter 14: Democracy and the Mines


• Chapter 15: Staying Alive


• People I Owe


• Notes


• The Narrators


• Index

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, shich won Italy's prestigious Viareggio Book Prize.

This book is a historical and cultural interpretation of a symbolic place in the United States, Harlan County, Kentucky, from pioneer times to the beginning of the third millennium, based on a painstaking and creative montage of more than 150 oral narratives and a wide array of secondary and archival matter.