BONUS: "Oh, that Nellie Oleson!" with Alison Anrgrim
Surprise! We’re back to share our extended interview with Alison Arngrim, aka everyone’s favorite mean girl: Nellie Oleson. She’s a powerhouse when it...
Wilder
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Jack Kerouac but make it a girl with braids. Carrie Bradshaw, but without the sex, and also braids. An American Icon. An American Odyssey. American propaganda. Violently so, in some cases. Laura Ingalls Wilder is evergreen. For better or worse. Since the first Little House book was published in 1932, generations of readers have flocked to Laura’s cozy stories of the Ingalls family settling the Western frontier. The series inspired a TV show, pageants, and entire fashion lines. Behind this franchise is a woman who experienced almost a full century of American history. She’d made her first trips in a covered wagon, and eventually flew on a jet plane. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and legacy remain as powerful, mesmerizing, controversial, and violent as the America she represents. In a country currently at odds with itself and its history could there be a better time for an exploration of this woman?
10. “It can never be a long time ago.”
As we talked about in our very first episode, the last line of Big Woods reads, “Now is now, it can never be a long time ago.” That line might be the ...
BONUS: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires
In all of our research for this show, one of the scholars who has most influenced our thinking on Laura and her work is Caroline Fraser, author of the...
BONUS: A chat with Melissa Gilbert
We’re nearing the end of our series, but before we go we have a surprise for you. Is it tin cups and peppermint sticks? A pig’s bladder? No! It’s our ...
9. The Business of Laura
Laura Ingalls Wilder probably couldn’t have imagined the multi-million dollar media empire that would emerge from her books. From the television show ...
8. Little Landon on the Prairie
This week, Little House goes to Hollywood. In the 1970s, the TV show Little House on the Prairie gave Laura’s books a whole new life. Tens of millions...
7. The Problem of Laura
What is our responsibility to the things we loved the most? One answer is to be brutally honest about who and what we love. That’s what we’re doing in...
6. Outside the Little Houses
At her best, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books offer a door for readers to walk through to get the full picture of the world th...
5. This American Life
One of the reasons the Little House books are so compelling is because Laura Ingalls was a real person. She lived the experiences she wrote about. The...
4. Daughter Dearest pt. 2: Politics and Rose
Who actually wrote the Little House books? For decades this question has loomed over the series. Was it Laura, a 65-year-old farm wife? Or her daughte...