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?
17 episodes transcribedWe’re back for a very special episode! It’s been a year since you last heard from us and so much happened. Thousands of people have listened to the sh...
Journalist Jo Piazza’s family has been playing a hundred year long game of telephone about the murder of her great great grandmother Lorenza Marsala....
Every family has an origin story – for author Jo Piazza (Under the Influence, Wilder) her family's is a murder mystery. For as long as she can remembe...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Laura Ingalls Wilder probably couldn’t have imagined the multi-million dollar media empire that would emerge from her books. From the television show...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Behind the cozy wholesome sweetness of the Little House books, is a raging mother and daughter relationship that is the stuff of soap operas and tablo...
How do you convey how much you loved the things you loved as a child? For lots of people, that thing is the Little House books. For better or worse, t...
Host Glynnis MacNicol has loved Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House books since she was a kid. She’s not alone in this, a lot of people have a s...
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