Plot Summary:Shadows of Endurance portraits two centuries of American history through stratified layers of time, comparing the lives of the people currently living in Harlan County with the huge amount of oral histories collected and recorded by Italian author, Alessandro Portelli, over 30 years of field research. The film is a journey through different times, each with their ghosts and voices, as a distant echo of a bygone age, re-emerging today in the places and faces explored by the camera.