Land of Laura: the Podcast about Laura Ingalls Wilder

What is a peplum — and could you have worn one in the 1980s? How many undergarments might a woman wear in the nineteenth century? What kind of a dress was Ma's delaine? How fashionable was Caroline Ingalls? Does the dress she wore in Little House in the Big Woods show up in other books in the Little House® series? Answers to these questions and more in tomorrow's episode of Land of Laura, when historic interpreter Laura Keyes (from Historic Voices) returns as promised to talk about Ma's delaine dress, as well as providing a detailed primer on pioneer ladies' underwear.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Who's planning a trip to Pepin?

One of the many homesites Laura Ingalls Wilder fans can visit is Laura's birthplace of Pepin, Wisconsin, a charming artistic town on the Great River Road on the Minnesota border. Kitty Latané is a longtime Pepin resident who has been deeply involved with the village of Pepin and Laura Ingalls Wilder's connection there for decades. She even wrote the foreword for the Land of Laura travel guide to Pepin. We're thrilled to have Kitty as this week's podcast guest to talk about her hometown, her role in Pepin's annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Days, and the newest event in Pepin, Home at Laura's Place.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Pepin, Wisconsin: lauraingallspepin.com

Laura Ingalls Wilder Days: lauradays.org

Instagram for T&C Latané: tandclatane

Land of Laura Pepin Travel Guide on Amazon

Dr. Beth Tarini was a medical school student when talk turned to scarlet fever. Scarlet fever — that's what made Mary Ingalls go blind, she thought. But her medical training had already taught her that wasn't possible. She started to wonder — what did cause Mary's blindness? As she became a doctor, the question stayed in her mind.

It would take another decade, but in 2012, working with research assistant Sarah Allexan — today a physician — they came up with an answer to that question that was so plausible, they co-wrote an article about it that was published in the medical journal Pediatrics in 2013.

Episode 20 of Land of Laura welcomes guests Dr. Beth Tarini and Dr. Sarah Allexan to look back on that article, their collaboration on it, and the historical and medical research that led to their conclusion on what exactly may have caused Mary Ingalls to go blind.

Pediatrics: Blindness in Walnut Grove: How Did Mary Ingalls Lose Her Sight?

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/131/3/404/31000/Blindness-in-Walnut-Grove-How-Did-Mary-Ingalls?redirectedFrom=fulltext

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Little House series

Little House on the Prairie

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Rose Wilder Lane

scarlet fever

Mary Ingalls blind

Some of us are scholars, some of us are creative, and some of us are both. Julia Park Tracey, Writer incorporated her Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship into her latest book, the adult novel WHOA, NELLY: A LOVE STORY WITH FOOTNOTES. What happens when an introverted librarian boards a train in California to meet up with like-minded fans in De Smet, South Dakota? On episode 19 author, journalist, and poet Julia Park Tracey tells us what we can expect.

Whoa, Nelly! A Love Story with Footnotes

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Find Julia on social media:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/juliaparktraceywriter

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliaparktracey/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@juliaparktracey

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@juliaparktracey

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/juliaparktracey.bsky.social

When author Sarah Miller heard the Little House audiobooks as an adult, she began to see Caroline Ingalls in a different way. In 2018 she published CAROLINE, a look at Laura Ingalls Wilder's book LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE from the perspective of the woman who held it all together: her mother, Caroline Ingalls.

http://www.sarahmillerbooks.com/

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Wendy McClure, author of ⁠The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie⁠ (Episode 6), brings her 30 years of experience in children's publishing to another visit to the Land of Laura studio. In an overview over two episodes, she'll orient us to the state of quality children's literature when Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Rose Wilder Lane) came on the scene. (Hint: it didn't exactly exist.) She'll also introduce us to all four of Laura's editors, including badass Ursula Nordstrom. She'll tell us about the ongoing branding and expansion of the Little House series that started in the 1990s and share her opinion on which Little House book is most likely to show up as a horror movie.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (Episode 6), brings her 30 years of experience in children's publishing to another visit to the Land of Laura studio. In an overview over two thirty-minute episodes, she'll orient us to the state of quality children's literature when Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Rose Wilder Lane) came on the scene. (Hint: it didn't exactly exist.) She'll also introduce us to all four of Laura's editors, including badass Ursula Nordstrom. She'll tell us about the ongoing branding and expansion of the Little House series that started in the 1990s and share her opinion on which Little House book is most likely to show up as a horror movie.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

For over fifty years, readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The First Four Years have found the book ... confusing. Why doesn't it sound like the other Little House books? Does it belong with the rest of the series? Why wasn't it published in Wilder's lifetime?

Welcome to part 2 of our interview with Pamela Smith Hill about her book Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books. This episode is all about when, and why, The First Four Years might have been written.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

With the massive project of editing and annotating the unpublished memoir Pioneer Girl behind her, Pamela Smith Hill thought she was done writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Alas, she was not. Last year she released Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books. The title came directly from the speech Wilder herself gave at the Detroit book Fair in 1937, which we told you all about back in Episode 10. In today’s episode, Pamela talks to Land of Laura about what prompted her to write the book, racism on the prairie, and the enduring legacy of the Little House books as classic American literature.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

What exactly is girls’ literature? What do we learn about Laura Ingalls Wilder when we study her work critically? What problems are inherent in being protective of "my" Laura?

And what if there's more than one Laura?

Today's guest, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Ph.D, is a scholar in girls' literature who has written extensively about Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was a contributor to the 2019 essay collection ⁠⁠Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond⁠.

For the past few years she’s been teaching virtual girls' literature classes through the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her next ⁠class on Laura Ingalls Wilder⁠ starts in March 2026.

===================Theme music is "Roll the Old Chariot Along" from the album Green Willow by the Dreadnaughts. Used with permission.====================

Girls Lit Reading Group (https://hollinsgirlslit.wordpress.com/)