Society - Harlan County, U.S.A.

Harlan County, USA is an Oscar-winning 1976 documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike" or "Bloody Harlan", an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Companys Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973. Directed by Barbara Kopple, who has long been an advocate of workers rights, Harlan County, U.S.A. is less ambivalent in its attitude toward unions than her later American Dream, the account of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86.