Long Journey Home explores the ethnic diversity of the Appalachian region, the economic forces causing people to migrate into and out of the area, and the choices individuals make to stay, to leave, and to come back. European immigrants recall the ethnic variety that existed in Appalachia during the first coal boom of the 1910s and ’20s, while African-Americans whose families left sharecropping in the South to build railroads and work in the mines talk about the transition to life in the coal camps. Common to all groups? Their dispersal across the country as automation took their jobs.