Episodes

The question has puzzled researchers for years: what happened with the baby Rose Wilder Lane lost early in her marriage to Gillette Lane? We first heard from Laura Ingalls Wilder biographer Sallie Ketcham back on episode 23 talking about Rose Wilder Lane’s ghostwriting. But she's also the researcher who couldn't stop wondering what exactly happened with the pregnancy Rose had mentioned obliquely over the course of her life. When was Rose pregnant? When did she lose the baby? And where? Sallie ...

After attending the very first LauraPalooza conference in 2010 put on by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association, researcher and educator Susan Thurlow prepared a project for the next conference in 2012. Her topic: Dr. George Tann, an African-American character from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1935 book Little House on the Prairie. As a parent of several African American and Afro-Caribbean children, Susan made this a family project, involving several of her children in the creation ...

Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in Mansfield, Missouri from 1894 until her death in 1957. Today, the farmhouse she and her husband, Almanzo, built, as well as the stone cottage known as the Rock House that their daughter Rose Wilder Lane designed and had built for them, are all part of the homesite in Mansfield. Collectively, the homesite is known by the name Laura gave it: Rocky Ridge Farm. Visitors to Rocky Ridge can tour the farmhouse, the Rock House, and a museum that houses an impressive colle...

Eddie Higgins, a researcher and friend of the Land of Laura podcast, interviews journalist and professor Christine Woodside. When Woodside set out to write a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she couldn't help but keep coming back to politics. Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was a silent collaborator in shaping the Little House book series, is considered along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson to be one of the founding godmothers of libertarianism. Woodside's resulting 2016 biography...

Peter Bagge has written graphic novels/biographies about three free-thinking, independent women living in the early to mid-twentieth century: birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston ... and Rose Wilder Lane. Peter describes the release of his book on Rose Wilder Lane,called CREDO, with one word: crickets. It just didn’t sell well. Even Land of Laura host Sandra Hume had dismissed the title at first, not quite absorbing that it was a biography about R...

We've all been anticipating the launch of the first season of the 2026 version of Little House on the Prairie on Netflix. Was it going to be like the 1970s Michael Landon show? Would it adhere closely to the book series, or would it deviate? How would they depict the Osage Native Americans? What would be added — or subtracted — to complete their vision? Land of Laura invited Laura Ingalls Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill along with The Wilder Life author Wendy McClure to come to the studio a...

Sandra Hume is back to welcome you to Season 2 of Land of Laura. Find out what's on deck for the second season and what changes are in store for the only podcast around about all things Laura Ingalls Wilder.