Little House on the Prarie

[detroitchef]

My kid was doing a research paper for her seventh grade class, and picked the LHOTP series. To her surprise, it turns out that the original handwritten manuscripts of Laura Ingalls Wilder went to her daughter Rose, and Rose died in Detroit in the 1920's and left teh manuscripts to the Burton Collection at DPL.

Man, that show with Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson was teh best. My older sisters used to make it a family night, and Ma would send Pa out for Saunders Hot Fudge Sundaes when Little House was one.

Good Times, good times. Anyone ever gone down to Burton and read the manuscripts?

[Wintersmommy]

my kid is just getting into these! I would love to see the orginals ...do they let you actually read them?

[tkierpiec]

Oh, how I loved those books and the television show! I was thrilled about a month ago when I sold a vintage prairie dress to the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Missouri.

[oldredfordette]

Rose Wilder Lane lived to the 1980's. There are other relatives in the Ingalls family in the area,my husband is one of them.

CC would have loved Rose Wilder Lane. She was a friend of the odious Ayn Rand.

[AQCE]

odious Ayn Rand.[/quote]
What?

[gazhekwe]

I had no idea the manuscripts were here! How great it would be to read them. Rose was an author of some note, and history suggests she did quite a bit of editing to make her mother's manuscripts more interesting to read. The last book in the series is These Happy Golden Years which ends with Laura's marriage to Almanzo Wilder. The First Four Years, found after Rose's death, came later, published in 1971.

Rose initially capped off the series with On the Way Home, the story of her family's move from DeSmet to Missouri. There were hints of some of the terrible troubles preceding that move, including Almanzo's near death from diphtheria which affected his health for the rest of his life, drought, and the death of an infant brother.

A subsequent account tells of Laura and Almanzo's return to DeSmet in the 40s when Almanzo was 90. I loved the quote from him, I guess if I can drive a team from DeSmet to Missouri, I can drive a car back there.

Rose was a very active Libertarian.

[FlyingJ]

It's the manuscripts for 2 of her books that Laura Ingalls Wilder sent to make up for her husband falling ill when she was to open the DPL Children's Library. The librarian let me sister look through one of them back on Noel Night in the 70's;
http://hoover.archives.gov/LIW/pione...d-writing.html

[mauser]

odious Ayn Rand.

What?[/quote]

Ayn Rand: cult leader of a socio-economic ideology based on self serving greed. Spurred on such bastardized movements as Reaganism, Voodoo Economics, Thatcherism, Neo Conservatism, Casino Capitalism and Disaster Capitalism.

This movement is solely responsible for the current world wide depression.

"Odious" was an understatement used by the poster in polite company.

[9mile&seneca]

Let's have another 40 years of the "Great Society". That should just about do it.

[Lorax]

Any derivitive of so-called conservativism- call it neocon, libertarianism, whatever, IS responsible for the position we now find ourselves in.

Unregulated business in any society is a perscription for disaster, and we had 8 years of unregulated fascism under the Tushies, and now need to dig ourselves out of it.

Once big business is rendered only a component of our economy rather than the reason for it's existence, then we'll have a better society to live in.

All you neocons out there will scream about the nanny state taking over, but done correctly, as it is in many European nations, we can have the truly socicalistic society our founding fathers envisioned.

I would suggest to any followers of Ayn Rand to read the constitution- "promote the general welfare" has meaning and shouldn't be ignored. Jefferson and Madison had the right idea.

Too bad the writer of Little House had such backwards political views- perhaps she should have kept to writing.