Harvard, it's going to be running in the Charleston area on WVPBS starting at 9:00 p.m. on Monday, April 13 and lasting for four weeks. I'm putting this info on the FOM list. This has not yet received much publicity in this area. I've pasted the Post-Gazette piece in below.
Harvard wrote:
Friends, relatives, etc.- Tomorrow night at 10:00PM on PBS will be a film called "Appalachia- A History of Mountains and People." Rumor has it that I will play a part. It is in four parts over the next four weeks, I think, and I don't know when I will appear. It's basically a history of the environmental movement in Appalachia. Take a look at the linked review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Harvard
PBS's 'Appalachia' examines region's heart and soul TV Review Tuesday, April 07, 2009 By Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press Sissy Spacek will narrate the four-part PBS series "Appalachia."
Appalachia is in a rarefied limelight this Thursday when PBS airs the first part of an engrossing and beautifully filmed and illustrated series subtitled "A History of Mountains and People."
"Appalachia" is both a paean to and an investigation of the world's oldest mountains, their sufferance and the sufferance of their inhabitants -- from chestnut trees and salamanders to the Saponi, Sugaree and Coosa tribes to the families who lived in squalor in company towns.
Should enough people actually watch it, "Appalachia" (10 p.m. Thursday, WQED) could be the beginning of a cure for society's malignant attitude about the region.
It doesn't portray Appalachia as anything it isn't; deeply isolated mountain people really are quaint. But there's so little deep isolation anymore, and Appalachia has been wrestled into the shape of the rest of the country. The otherness that fascinated the first outside journalists has been eradicated over a century like so many irreplaceable qualities.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People'
**** ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Narrated by actress Sissy Spacek, with interviews of scientists, historians and novelists, the four-part series begins with the birth of the mountains 500 million years ago. The breakup of the supercontinent Pangea led to collisions that caused mantle to buckle and lift.
In Part II (10 p.m. April 16), native and European cultures collided, most horrifically when Hernando de Soto and his wild band of horsemen slayed people who wouldn't show them where the nonexistent gold was.
Part III (10 p.m. April 23) brings us into the mid-1800s. Industrialization quickens the pace, levels old-growth forests and turns one of Earth's great wonders into a commodity.
The greatest tragedy of Appalachia is that it became what anthropologist Harvard Ayers called "a resource colony, an environment you could sacrifice for the benefit of the rest of the country."
Part IV (10 p.m. April 30) is less thematic. It tells of the forestry conservation movement; the labor movement and the violent resistance of coal companies against it; the cultural renaissance from which emerged the writings of Thomas Wolfe and the Carter family's music; and the loss of the American chestnut, Appalachia's crowning species.
A very brief few minutes is given to the shocking devastation that a handful of "miners" can cause by blowing an entire mountain apart and throwing everything that buried the coal into the ridges below. Mountaintop removal mining -- a still-legal form of environmental mayhem -- is Appalachia's most spotlighted issue today, but this series puts it in historical place on a very long timeline.
Much of the political history of this series, such as the role John L. Lewis and Mary "Mother Jones" Harris played in organizing labor, has worn deep grooves into the brain by now, but there's some surprising learnin' to be had. Who knew, for example, that some species of trees and salamanders in Appalachia have matches in southeast China -- and nowhere else in the world; and that more species of trees live in one acre of North Carolina mountains than in all of Europe?
Few documentaries give equal time to species other than the human to explain a history. This one does. It gives first billing, though, to the mountains themselves -- the "soul and spine" of a people as diverse as any but bound by a heart tug for "home" that's all about being an underdog who knows a superior beauty.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com mailto:djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. See her online site "City Walkabout" at post-gazette.com/journals http://www.post-gazette.com/journals.