In the hills of Central Appalachia, up winding, mountain roads, is a place where families face unthinkable living conditions. Isolated pockets here have three times the national poverty rate, an epidemic of drug abuse, and the shortest life span in the nation. In this program, Diane Sawyer travels to the Appalachian Mountains to report on children who live in rural poverty, and in particular, four who are determined to find a better life. For nearly...

The story of an Edwardian family trapped in welfare dependency and a mother accused of a shocking crime against her own child. Did the handouts given to Susan Nelson's family by a prosperous charity visitor provide her descendants with the chance to move up in life or was it all down to their own hard graft? More than a hundred years on, some of Susan's descendants are still locked in patterns of benefit dependency, while others have freed their families...

In the poverty of the Appalachian coal country in 1908, eight-year-old Minna's life gets even more difficult after her father dies of black lung, and that winter she cannot go to school because she does not have a coat--until the quilting mothers make her a coat using pieces of cloth from their own lives, each with a special story behind it.