Episodes

In 1974, Ed Friendly created the Little House on the Prairie TV show with Michael Landon. Creative differences spurred Ed to leave the show early on, though he still produced it. This July, a new Little House on the Prairie comes to the small screen. It's executive produced by Friendly Family Productions, where Ed's son, Trip, is the CEO. Today Trip is our guest on Land of Laura, along with his daughter, Rebecca, COO of the company. They're both excited for the new Little House on the Prairie, a...

Author Nancy McCabe listened to several episodes of Land of Laura and heard the guests share their origin stories. She thought: what about Sandra Hume's origin story? In this episode Nancy turns the tables on Sandra and asks what brought the podcast host into the world of Little House. Sandra shares her history with creating the Homesteader newsletter, co-founding the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association and its LauraPalooza conference, publishing the Land of Laura travel guides ...

Historian Michelle Marie Martin, PhD, was with the Little House on the Prairie Museum at Independence, Kansas from2008-2015, the last four years as executive director of the site. In this episode Dr. Martin shares the history of the site, the complicated history of the Osage land, how living history can be a tool for learning, and why the African American doctor who cared for the Ingalls family, George Tann, is so darn interesting. Every August the Little House on the Prairie Museum hosts Carrie...

Erin Blakemore is a journalist, historian, and author of the book The Heroine's Bookshelf. Here's part 2 of her interview where she details the magic of listening to the Little House books on audiobook for the first time. Erin shares several of her revelations, including how she feels Laura Ingalls Wilder used horses as a vehicle to communicate sensuality and sexuality when she didn't have the words to do it otherwise. Also, in the midst of narrator Cherry Jones' brilliance, the few things she g...

Erin Blakemore is a journalist, historian, and author of the book The Heroine's Bookshelf . Recently after brain surgery she turned to the the comfort of her beloved Little House books in a way she never had before: by listening to them on audio. Erin's first time listening to Cherry Jones' masterful narration of the entire Little House series was transformative. In the first of two episodes, Erin shares that experience with Land of Laura's listeners and offers commentary of her own on the endur...

With fully half of the books taking place there, De Smet, Dakota Territory — South Dakota today — is the pinnacle of Little House homesites. By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years are all grounded in the tiny town of De Smet. From the Surveyors' House to the house Pa built on Third Street to a robust collection of Ingalls and Wilder artifacts, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society is responsible for overseeing and preserving th...

What Laura Ingalls Wilder fan among us hasn't dreamed of living in De Smet, South Dakota? Eric Fairchild actually made that a reality when he and his partner took over Prairie House Manor Bed and Breakfast , a longtime staple of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Dakota Territory hometown. On this week's Land of Laura podcast, Eric tells us all about his career change from retail lifer to innkeeper, the experience of trading urban Colorado for South Dakota, and the joy of immersing himself fully in the hist...

Have you ever looked at one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's manuscripts? Or dug into Rose Wilder Lane's journal entries? Or read the letters Rose exchanged with her beloved "Mama Bess"? The largest collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane research materials is in West Branch, Iowa, at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. This week Land of Laura talks to Hoover archivist Spencer Howard as well as researcher Eddie Higgins. Tune in to hear all about how the Laura/Rose collection...

This week Land of Laura is thrilled to talk with ‪@LauraIngallsGunn‬ . In the past few years, the interior designer has found herself increasingly seated behind her sewing machine. She has been recreating clothing based on descriptions found on the pages of the Little House® books as well as from the Little House on the Prairie television series. Her lovingly handcrafted garments have been displayed at Little House celebrations and museums all over the country. ‪@LauraIngallsGunn‬ has a forthcom...

Let the Hurricane Roar ... Missouri Ruralist ... the Rock House ... LauraPalooza ... Holtz ... homesite ... Burr Oak ... what is the significance of all these terms in the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder? If you've ever wondered what we're referring to sometimes when we're talking on the podcast, we're here to help. Presenting Laura Ingalls Wilder 101.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2018. Before writing Prairie Fires , author Caroline Fraser was selected to edit the Library of America's official two-volume set of the Little House® books. Back in the early 90s, her extensive review of William Holtz's Ghost in the Little House was featured in the New York Review of Books. Her latest book, Murderland , looks at environmental links between serial killers and polluted areas of the ...

Scholars have wondered for years about what happened to Rose Wilder Lane's "lost" Armenian book. Thanks to historian and author Ginger Pedersen, now they know. Dr. Mabel Elliott worked tirelessly in early-1920s Europe to help thousands of Armenian women and orphans in the aftermath of the horrific Armenian genocide. She subsequently wrote a book about that work. A hundred years later, Ginger Pederson was in the thick of research for her biography on Dr. Elliott, Unbreakable Healer , when she lea...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 ======...

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 Urs...

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, includin...

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 w...

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 ab...

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...

Dr. Kelly Ferguson has been entertaining Laura fans since 2011 with her hilarious book MY LIFE AS LAURA: HOW I SEARCHED FOR LAURA INGALLS WILDER AND FOUND MYSELF . But writing about Laura had a way of breaking her heart, and fifteen years later, she's embraced a new affinity for Rose Wilder Lane. Kelly's substack, Albaniac , details her own travels to Rose's onetime home and shares interviews with the top minds in Rose Wilder Lane scholarship. Today, Land of Laura talks to Kelly about the book, ...

At its core, the Land of Laura podcast is about celebrating the people in world of Laura Ingalls Wilder: the researchers, the museum professionals, the historians, the academics, the fans ... all of us. But what exactly is it about Laura Ingalls Wilder that brings us all together when we're all so different? New York City–based filmmaker Amy Elliott asked herself that questions, and decided she wanted to answer it in film. She's just finishing up filming for Girls Gone Wilder , a documentary tha...