Holocene Records of Nebraska Mammals

A survey of the archeological and paleontological literature allowed a compilation of Holocene records of mammals in Nebraska. This survey identified Holocene records from 338 sites in 62 of the 93 Nebraska counties. These counties were located throughout state, but there was a concentration of sites in southwestern Nebraska where there were 27 fossil sites in Frontier County and 22 in Harlan County. Fossils sites were underrepresented in the Sand Hills region. Records of fossil mammals covered the entire Holocene period from 13,000 years ago until AD 1850. A minimum of 57 species (with eight additional species potentially present) representing six orders of mammals were represented in the compilation—four species of Lagomorpha, four species of Soricomorpha, 17 species of Carnivora (with three additional species potentially present), one species of Perissodactyla, six species of Artiodactyla, and 25 species of Rodentia (with five additional species potentially present). The remains of bison were found at 276 sites, which was more than for any other species in the state. Additional species that formed the main portion of the diet of Native Americans were the next most abundant in the fossil record—deer, pronghorn, and wapiti. That these food species dominated in the Holocene record was to be expected because fossils were recovered primarily from archeological sites.

Evolving Documentaries and Social Change

Opening with Barbara Kopple’s groundbreaking 1976 film, Harlan County, U.S.A., this chapter provides historical highlights to reveal how shifting cultural backdrops provided the fertile ground for documentary filmmakers, philanthropists, and new organizations to shape the practices, forms, values, marketplace, and audiences for present-day documentary storytelling and the ecology of professionals who enable and produce them. The bedrock values and practices of the contemporary social-issue documentary tradition evolved through individual organizations and people who laid the groundwork during the analog age, spurred by tumultuous demands for equity and a climate of social consciousness. Chapter 2 provides historical highlights organized by four core themes: enabling infrastructure developed out of movement culture and tension, civic motivation in documentary practice, representation of diverse voices and experiences, and shifting media platforms and technology that have aided documentary’s marketplace expansion. As other chapters illustrate, these themes underlie present-day documentary practice and public engagement.

Outtakes of ’68

If ’68 marks the emergence of seemingly new kinds of radical practices pursued by new revolutionary subjects, this essay asks how we might understand a strike undertaken by Appalachian coal miners in the early 1970s and its documentation in the film Harlan County, USA. Is this strike best understood apart from ’68, as a disconnected, outmoded activity pursued by retrograde subjects who, after ’68, can only be represented by and for nostalgic or reactionary political projects? In the strike’s abandonment of political and auterist representation, in the commitment not to any one endpoint but to the ongoing, performative reorganization of social life that the strike and its documentation come to entail, and finally, in the tenuous but still open connections between this strike and other radical practices in and beyond Appalachia, in and beyond ’68, this essay discerns another model for insurgency and for a history without subjects.

Higher Ground Project

The power of community is at the center of a series of musical plays created by the Higher Ground Project, which is composed of students at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College and residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, and is spearheaded by Robert Gipe, director of the college’s Appalachian Program. The plays begin with oral histories gathered by Appalachian studies students and other Harlan County community members as part of grants awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Appalachian Regional Commission; from these interviews, Higher Ground participants create musical theater. Playwright Jo Carson worked with the project for its first play....

Robert Gipe

Robert Gipe was reared in Kingsport, Tennessee. After earning a BA from Wake Forest University and an MA from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Gipe worked in marketing and educational outreach at Appalshop, a grassroots media production company in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a position that foreshadowed the synthesis of community outreach and the arts that has characterized his career. Beginning in 1997, Gipe served as the director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Harlan County....

American Dream in God’s Country: Odysseys in Documentary, Hospitality, Place

This chapter argues that Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990) and Louis Malle’s God’s Country (1985), although quite different in tone and subject matter, presciently trace the outlines of current political fragmentation and economic despair during the era of Donald Trump’s election and presidency. The chapter argues that if American Dream is a dystopian sequel to Harlan County USA, then God’s Country can be viewed as a portrait of a ragged social fabric barely covering the racism and anti-Semitism of the townspeople. Both films depend upon the kindness of strangers: the openness of citizens of “fly-over” America to outsiders—both Jews, a New Yorker and a Frenchman, with cameras, microphones and crew—who are at once keen observers of the subtle interactions among neighbors, friends, and adversaries and intimate participants in the day-to-day struggles that comprise a strike or a farm. Attentive to place, the chapter argues these films explore labor and affect through the presence of the camera.

Harlan County, USA and the Documentary Form: A Forty-year Retrospective

This chapter revisits E. Ann Kaplan’s “Harlan County USA: The Documentary Form,” which appeared in the journal Jump Cut in 1977 and remains one of the few in-depth articles devoted to Kopple’s early career. This chapter reassesses the film’s significance in terms of the documentary genre, labor films, and women in cinema. It considers Kaplan’s initial review of the film in light of vogue of semiology and psychoanalytic approaches to cinema in the 1970s, including issues of representation and notions of “the real” in documentary. Finally, it considers why Harlan County USA in particular and Kopple’s career in general remain so important to documentary cinema.

Gender Agency: Harlan County, USA, Shut Up & Sing!, and This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous

This chapter examines three documentaries, Harlan County USA (1976), Shut Up and Sing! (2006), and This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous (2017), in which individuals consciously subvert traditional gender roles as they battle contexts of discrimination and forces of oppression in the United States and globally. The chapter explores how these documentaries trace coal miners’ wives, female musicians, and a youthful YouTube transgender personality, as they become extraordinary in their fights for living wages, civil rights, justice and equality. It reflects on potential connections between Kopple’s personal story as a woman documentary filmmaker, persevering in making films in a predominantly male-driven industry, and casting an empathetic eye on her subjects as they resiliently perform gender in unexpected and empowering ways.

Which Side Are You On? An Intersectional Approach to Music in Three Films by Barbara Kopple

This chapter examines the ways in which gender, class, and race are constructed through music in several of Kopple’s films. In Harlan County USA (1976), music emanates from the setting, but also plays a role in creating the identity of the film’s primary subjects, the striking miners’ wives. In Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), Jones’ battle with cancer is at the core of the narrative, but her neo-soul music is also a primary subject of the film. In both films, the chapter argues that music drives the story and provides a rich setting for lived experience. Building on existing scholarship on race, class, and gender in Appalachian folk music and the soul revival, this chapter also explores how music resonates with popular discourses on race, class, and gender.