Synopsis
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books
Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls-the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser-the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series-masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder's biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.
The Little House books, for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds. But Wilder's real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children's books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading-and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters.
Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder's dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.
Review
Caroline Fraser is the editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, and the author of Rewilding the World and God's Perfect Child. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.
"An absorbing new biography [that] deserves recognition as an essential text.... For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder's "Little House' books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure.... Meanwhile, "Little House' devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser devotes to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth."
-The New York Times Book Review (front page)
"The definitive biography... Magisterial and eloquent... A rich, provocative portrait."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Impressive... Prairie Fires could not have been published at a more propitious time in our national life."
-The New Republic
"Unforgettable... A magisterial biography, which surely must be called definitive. Richly documented (it contains 85 pages of notes), it is a compelling, beautifully written story.... One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is its delineation of the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter."
-Booklist (starred review)
"A fantastic book. We've long understood the Little House series to be a great American story, but Caroline Fraser brings it unprecedented new context, as she masterfully chronicles the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family alongside the complicated history of our nation. Prairie Fires represents a significant milestone in our understanding of Wilder's life, work, and legacy."
-Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
"Meticulously researched, feelingly told, Prairie Fires is the definitive biography of a major writer who did so much to mold public perceptions of the Western frontier. Once again, Caroline Fraser has shown that she is a master of the careful art of sifting a life, finding meaning in the large and small events that shaped an iconic American figure. Prairie Fires is a magnificent contribution to the literature of the West."
-Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
"At last, an unsentimental examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder's real life on the frontier. Caroline Fraser rescues Wilder from frontier myth and gives us the gritty, passionate woman who endured the harshest experiences of homesteading, loved the Great Plains, and was devastated by their ultimate ruin and loss. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Prairie Fires is a major contribution to environmental history and literary biography."
-Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
"In the twenty-first century, the tense and secret authorial partnership between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane has emerged as the most complex and fascinating psychological saga of mother-daughter collaboration in American literary history. Caroline Fraser's deeply researched and stimulating biography analyzes their controversial relationship and places Wilder's influential fiction in the contexts of other myths of pioneer women and the frontier."
-Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers and The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe
"Engrossing... Exhilarating... Lovers of the series will delight in learning about real-life counterparts to classic fictional episodes, but, as Fraser emphasizes, the true story was often much harsher. Meticulously tracing the Ingalls and Wilder families' experiences through public records and private documents, Fraser discovers failed farm ventures and constant money problems, as well as natural disasters even more terrifying and devastating in real life than in Wilder's writing. She also helpfully puts Wilder's narrow world into larger historical context."
-Publishers Weekly
Prairie Fires
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books. The Little House books, for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds. But Wilder’s real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading—and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters. Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder’s dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.
Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ..."
God's Perfect Child (Twentieth Anniversary Edition)
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Christian Scientist Caroline Fraser comes the first unvarnished account of one of America's most controversial and little-understood religious movements. Millions of Americans Рfrom Lady Astor to Ginger Rogers to Watergate conspirator H. R. Haldeman Рhave been touched by the Church of Christ, Scientist. Founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, Christian Science was based on a belief that intense contemplation of the perfection of God can heal all ills Рan extreme expression of the American faith in self-reliance. In this unflinching investigation, Caroline Fraser, herself raised in a Scientist household, shows how the Church transformed itself from a small, eccentric sect into a politically powerful and socially respectable religion, and explores the human cost of Christian Science's remarkable rise. Fraser examines the strange life and psychology of Mary Baker Eddy, who lived in dread of a kind of witchcraft she called Malicious Animal Magnetism. She takes us into the closed world of Eddy's followers, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of illness and death and reject modern medicine, even at the cost of their children's lives. She reveals just how Christian Science managed to gain extraordinary legal and Congressional sanction for its dubious practices and tracks its enormous influence on new-age beliefs and other modern healing cults. A passionate expos̩ of zealotry, God's Perfect Child tells one of the most dramatic and little-known stories in American religious history.
In this unflinching investigation, Caroline Fraser, herself raised in a Scientist household, shows how the Church transformed itself from a small, eccentric sect into a politically powerful and socially respectable religion, and explores ..."
The Westward Expansion : Pros and Cons of Moving West | Grade 7 US History | Children's United States History Books
In 1803, the United States bought land from France. It was so big that the United States doubled twice its land size. With this new land waiting to be settled, people started moving west. This book will explore the pros and cons of the "Westward Expansion." Chapter one includes a brief background to the expansion while the succeeding two chapters enumerate the positives and negatives of the migration.
In 2017 , another book was published entitled Prairie Fires : The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . It was written by Caroline Fraser . This book is the life story of Wilder . Prairie Fires : The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls ..."
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder
Contributions by Emily Anderson, Elif S. Armbruster, Jenna Brack, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Christiane E. Farnan, Melanie J. Fishbane, Vera R. Foley, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Anna Thompson Hajdik, Keri Holt, Shosuke Kinugawa, Margaret Noodin, Anne K. Phillips, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Katharine Slater, Lindsay Stephens, and Jericho Williams Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among other issues. The collection argues that Wilder's work and her contributions to US children's literature, western literature, and the pioneer experience must be considered in context with problematic racialized representations of peoples of color, specifically Native Americans. While Wilder's fiction accurately represents the experiences of white settlers, it also privileges their experiences and validates, explicitly and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture. The volume’s contributors engage critically with Wilder's writings, interrogating them, acknowledging their limitations, and enhancing ongoing conversations about them while placing them in context with other voices, works, and perspectives that can bring into focus larger truths about North American history. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder examines Wilder's strengths and weaknesses as it discusses her writings with context, awareness, and nuance.
For further discussion of Wilder's increasing financial autonomy, see Fraser 179. 3. In Pioneer Girl, the descriptions of town ... Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . Metropolitan/Henry Holt ..."
American Indians at the Margins
Since the earliest days of America, racist imagery has been used to create harmful stereotypes of the indigenous people. In this book, the conflict between invading European white settlers and the indigenous groups who occupied the land that became the United States is described through the context of race and racism. Using depictions from art, literature, radio, cinema and television, the origin and persistence of such stereotypes are explained, and their debilitating effects on the well-being of Indians are presented. This text also explores their accomplishments in attempts to maintain their sovereignty, dignity and respect.
Historical Society Press, 2007), especially chapters 10–13. 11. Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 315. 12. Hill, Laura Ingalls Wilder , 7. 13. Ibid., 3. 14."
Re-living the American Frontier
Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.
Kiracofe , Roderick , and Mary Elizabeth Johnson . The American Quilt : A History of Cloth and Comfort 1750–1950 . New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004. Kitchen, E. F., and Leo Braudy. Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages."
Writing the Wild Frontier
For over 200 years, the American Western novel has chronicled much of the American experience, especially those of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, Andy Adams, Jack Schaefer and Larry McMurtry. Alongside the roguish figure of the cowboy, Westerns depict the experiences of women and minorities as they face the hardships and deprivations of the frontier. This book is directed at the general reader who is interested in the literature, history and culture of the American West. Exploring novels that have achieved a high level of acclaim, it is a survey and homage to the frontier's lasting works, detailing both the writers' lives and their fictional creations. The author traces the development of the Western novel through biography, anecdote, summary, analysis and informed criticism, revealing the struggles and triumphs of the genre's authors, the changing standards of the frontier story and the lasting effects of the region's magisterial landscape.
Minority writing of the West in recent years has also included the emergence of Asian American authors . C . Pam Zhang's debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a harrowing addition to the literature of the American West ."
Unknown No More
Thanks in part to the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl, Sanora Babb is perhaps best known today for her novel Whose Names Are Unknown (2004), which might have been published in 1939 had her publisher not thought the market too small for two Dust Bowl novels, hers and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Into the twenty-first century, Babb wrote and published lyrical prose and poetry that revealed her prescient ideas about gender, race, and the environment. The essays collected in Unknown No More recover and analyze her previously unrecognized contributions to American letters. Editors Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith have assembled a group of distinguished scholars who, for the first time in book-length form, explore the life and work of Sanora Babb. This collection of pathbreaking essays addresses Babb’s position within the literature of the Great Plains and American West, her leftist political odyssey as a card-carrying Communist who ultimately broke with the Party, and her ecofeminist leanings as reflected in the environmental themes she explored in her fiction and nonfiction. With literary sensibilities reminiscent of Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, and Meridel LeSueur, Babb’s work revealed gender-based, environmental, and working-class injustices from the Depression era to the late twentieth century. No longer unknown, Sanora Babb’s life and work form a prism through which the peril and promise of twentieth-century America may be seen.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . Metropolitan Books, 2017. Freitag, Florian. The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, ..."
Bet the Farm
“Eloquent and detailed...precise and well-thought-out...Read her book — and listen.” — Jane Smiley, The Washington Post. Beth Hoffman was living the good life: she had a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home in San Francisco, and plenty of close friends and family. Yet in her late 40s, she and her husband decided to leave the big city and move to his family ranch in Iowa—all for the dream of becoming a farmer, to put into practice everything she had learned over decades of reporting on food and agriculture. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019. Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth’s eyes as a beginning farmer. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass-finished beef is a nightmare. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn’t a romantic fantasy that takes every cent of their savings. Even with a decent nest egg and access to land, making ends meet at times seems impossible. And Beth knows full well that she is among the privileged. If Beth can’t make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don’t have other jobs to fall back on? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.
Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), p. 64. Fraser here cites Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ..."
Making Believe
Making Believe responds to a remarkable flowering of art by Mennonites in Canada. After the publication of his first novel in 1962, Rudy Wiebe was the only identifiable Mennonite literary writer in the country. Beginning in the 1970s, the numbers grew rapidly and now include writers Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Sarah Klassen, Armin Wiebe, David Bergen, Miriam Toews, Carrie Snyder, Casey Plett, and many more. A similar renaissance is evident in the visual arts (including artists Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, and Aganetha Dyck) and in music (including composers Randolph Peters, Carol Ann Weaver, and Stephanie Martin). Confronted with an embarrassment of riches that resist survey, Magdalene Redekop opts for the use of case studies to raise questions about Mennonites and art. Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact. Constant questioning and commitment to community are part of the Mennonite dissenting tradition. Although these values come up against the legacy of radical Anabaptist hostility to art, Redekop argues that the Early Modern roots of a contemporary crisis of representation are shared by all artists. Making Believe posits a Spielraum or play space in which all artists are dissembling tricksters, but differences in how we play are inflected by where we come from. The close readings in this book insist on respect for difference at the same time as they invite readers to find common ground while making believe across cultures.
Fraser , Caroline . 2017. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Henry Holt and Company. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response."
Backcountry Ghosts
Josh Sides tells the remarkable stories of the men and women who claimed homesteads in California and began a perilous quest to attain the American Dream at virtually any cost.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Frymer, Paul. Building an Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ..."
The Lost President
Though few people have heard of A.D. Smith (1811–65), this nineteenth-century knight-errant left his mark on some of the key events of his times in several states, personifying the nineteenth-century impulse to move across the American landscape. Smith’s Quixotic trail began in upstate New York, wound westward to the Ohio and Wisconsin frontier, southward to the federally occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina, and finally ended aboard a northbound steamer. In Ohio, Smith became involved with a paramilitary group, the Hunters’ Lodge, which elected him the “President of the Republic of Canada.” In Wisconsin he achieved notoriety as the judge who dared to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional, lighting one of many fuses that sparked the Civil War. In South Carolina he fought passionately for the property rights of freedmen. Smith believed in civic movements based on Jeffersonian democracy and republican ideals. Civic participation, he believed, was a fundamental part of being a good American. This civic impulse resulted in his enthusiastic embrace of the reform movements of the day and his absolute dedication to radicalism. A detective story set against the backdrop of the volatile antebellum era, this gripping biography lays bare, in funny, accessible prose, just what it is that historians really do all day and how obsessive they can be—assembling a jigsaw puzzle of secret documents, probate records, court testimony, speeches, correspondence, newspaper coverage, and genealogical research to tell the story of a man like Smith, of his vision for the United States, and, more generally, of the value of remembering secondary historical characters.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Metropolitan, 2017. Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion. Vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990."
Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook
Ole Hendricks was an immigrant both representative and exceptional--a true artistic talent who nevertheless lived a familiar immigrant experience. By day, he was a farmer. But at night, his fiddle lit up dance halls, bringing together all manner of neighbors in rural Minnesota. Each tune in his repertoire of waltzes, reels, polkas, quadrilles, and more were copied neatly into his commonplace book. Such tunebooks, popular during the nineteenth century, rarely survive and are often overlooked by folk scholars in favor of commercially produced recordings, published sheet music, or oral tradition. Based on extensive historical and genealogical research, Amy Shaw presents a grounded picture of a musician, his family, and his community in the Upper Midwest, revealing much about music and dance in the area. This notable contribution to regional music and folklore includes more than one hundred of Ole's dance tunes, transcribed into modern musical notation for the first time. Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook will be valuable to readers and scholars interested in ethnomusicology and the Norwegian American immigrant experience.
In The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 3rd ed., edited by Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. Oxford Reference database. ... Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder ."
The Historian's Red Badge of Courage: Reading Stephen Crane's Masterpiece as Social and Cultural History
For someone who did not actually fight in the American Civil War, Stephen Crane was extraordinarily accurate in his description of the psychological tension experienced by a youthful soldier grappling with his desire to act heroically, his fears, and redemption. Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage provides an extraordinary take on the battlefield experiences of a young soldier coming of age under extreme circumstances. His writing took place a generation after the war's conclusion, at a time when the entire nation was coming to grips with the meaning of the Civil War. It was during this time in the late 19th century that the battle over the memory of the war was taking place. This new, annotated edition of the novel is designed to guide readers through references made through Crane's characters and how they reflect Civil War military experiences—specifically how "the youth's" experiences reflect the reality of the multi-day battle of Chancellorsville, which took place in Virginia beginning on May 1, 1863, and concluded on May 4 of the same year. The annotated text is preceded by introductory essays on Crane and on the Civil War. Crane's short story "The Veteran" is also included to allow readers to better understand the post-war lives of Civil War soldiers. Explains key background information for better understanding The Red Badge of Courage Includes introductory essays on Crane and on the Civil War Provides the full text for both Red Badge and Crane's lesser-known short story "The Veteran" with comprehensive annotations that illuminate the links between the stories and their historical contexts
Gettysburg . Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sears , Stephen W . 1983b. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields. Sears , Stephen W . 2017. Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac."
Charmian Kittredge London
Charmian Kittredge London (1871–1955) was the epitome of a modern woman. Free-spirited and adventurous, she defied modern expectations of femininity. Today she is best known as the wife of the famous American author Jack London, yet she was a literary trailblazer in her own right. This biography is the first book to tell the complete story of Charmian’s life—freed from the shadow cast by her famous husband. In this biography, Iris Jamahl Dunkle draws the reader into Charmian’s private and public worlds, underscoring her literary achievements and the significant role she played in promoting her husband’s legacy. Her life, as Dunkle emphasizes, required fortitude and bravery, and in many ways it paralleled the history of the American West. Born on the mudflats of what would become Los Angeles’s harbor, Charmian became an orphan at age fourteen. Raised by her aunt Netta Wiley Ames, a noted writer and editor for the Overland Monthly, Charmian attended college, became an expert equestrian and concert pianist, and had a successful career as a stenographer. But her life shifted when, in 1905, she married Jack London, already a bestselling author. For the rest of Jack’s life, until his untimely death at the age of forty, reporters would follow the couple’s every move. Charmian and Jack traveled the world, exploring and writing together. In addition to collaborating with Jack on many of his projects, Charmian wrote three books about her travels, as well as countless articles. After Jack’s death in 1916, she remained a celebrity, continuing to travel and write—and seek adventure. She also wrote a biography about her late husband and managed his estate, influencing how Jack’s literary legacy was remembered. Charmian Kittredge London is a central figure in California cultural history. Now, thanks to Dunkle’s riveting portrait, readers have the opportunity to embark on the grand adventure that was her life.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Frisken, Amanda. Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century ..."
Drawing Close, Encountering Joy
From Fort Rock to Hovenweep, redwoods to the Rockies, ocean to high desert, here is an invitation to connect with the natural world. Psalms and prayers for the earth unfold from early morning dew through daytime hours to the night watch. Delight in the colors of dawn, linger in the fellowship of the forest, savor the solitude, lament the losses, be refreshed by tumbling waters, celebrate the glories of life, and hear the robin singing . . . singing. Draw close, enter into the experience. Encounter the joy and peace of the natural world. Through the eyes of an artist, discover nature’s abiding witness to the “wondrous Mystery wrapped in beauty.”
Recommended Reading Fraser , Caroline , Prairie Fires, The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder , New York: Picador, Henry Holt & Co., 2018. The back story of the Little House books, but also the story of the tallgrass prairie from ..."
Salinas
An ambitious history of a California city that epitomizes the history of race relations in modern America. Although much has been written about the urban–rural divide in America, the city of Salinas, California, like so many other places in the state and nation whose economies are based on agriculture, is at once rural and urban. For generations, Salinas has been associated with migrant farmworkers from different racial and ethnic groups. This broad-ranging history of "the Salad Bowl of the World" tells a complex story of community-building in a multiracial, multiethnic city where diversity has been both a cornerstone of civic identity and, from the perspective of primarily white landowners and pragmatic agricultural industrialists, essential for maintaining the local workforce. Carol Lynn McKibben draws on extensive original research, including oral histories and never-before-seen archives of local business groups, tracing Salinas's ever-changing demographics and the challenges and triumphs of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Depression-era Dust Bowl migrants and white ethnic Europeans. McKibben takes us from Salinas's nineteenth-century beginnings as the economic engine of California's Central Coast up through the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color today, especially farmworkers who already live on the margins. Throughout the century-plus of Salinas history that McKibben explores, she shows how the political and economic stability of Salinas rested on the ability of nonwhite minorities to achieve a measure of middle-class success and inclusion in the cultural life of the city, without overturning a system based in white supremacy. This timely book deepens our understanding of race relations, economic development, and the impact of changing demographics on regional politics in urban California and in the United States as a whole.
For a thorough analysis of the proliferation of sometimes short-lived railroad settlements in the West, see Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Henry Holt, 2017): Richard White, ..."
Being Possible
In April 2019, Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson sat down with Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek for a debate that would collect higher ticket prices than the local Toronto Maple Leafs game. The debate was considered by many to be something of a dud, with both figures largely appearing to talk past each other, but to ignore it would be a mistake. Instead, the fact that a major public event put the Communist vs. Capitalist question back into play speaks to larger cultural trends that are occurring; an old consensus seems to be bursting at the seams, and it’s unclear if the center will hold or be moved. Taking on the existentialism of Martin Heidegger as their starting point, Stephen Dozeman argues that understanding this debate means starting with the individual subject, and understanding its increasingly confused and precarious place in a disenchanted world. Wandering in between philosophical theory, history, popular culture, and back to philosophy again, this book tries to explore why so many feel compelled to call ancient wisdom into question, and what it might mean to take responsibility for our lives.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Picador, 2017. Fritsche, J. “National Socialism, Anti-Semitism, and Philosophy in Heidegger and Scheler: On Peter Trawny's Heidegger and the Myth of ..."
A Sky Full of Song
This heartwarming, beautifully written middle-grade historicalnovel about an untold American frontier story is destined to be a cherished classic. North Dakota, 1905 After fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire, eleven-year-old Shoshana and her family, Jewish immigrants, start a new life on the prairie. Shoshana takes fierce joy in the wild beauty of the plains and the thrill of forging a new, American identity. But it’s not as simple for her older sister, Libke, who misses their Ukrainian village and doesn’t pick up English as quickly or make new friends as easily. Desperate to fit in, Shoshana finds herself hiding her Jewish identity in the face of prejudice, just as Libke insists they preserve it. For the first time, Shoshana is at odds with her beloved sister, and has to look deep inside herself to realize that her family’s difference is their greatest strength. By listening to the music that’s lived in her heart all along, Shoshana finds new meaning in the Jewish expression all beginnings are difficult, as well as in the resilience and traditions her people have brought all the way to the North Dakota prairie.
Fraser , Caroline . Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . New York: Henry Holt, 2017. Hansen, Karen V. Encounters on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890–1930."
Mud, Blood, and Ghosts
Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family’s history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven’t traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem’s journey with that of America’s white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.
Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West Julie Carr ... In his mind - opening book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2018), Greg Grandin argues that the frontier didn't ..."
Nicholas Black Elk
Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk (1863—1950) is popularly celebrated for his fascinating spiritual life. How could one man, one deeply spiritual man, serve as both a traditional Oglala Lakota medicine man and a Roman Catholic catechist and mystic? How did these two spiritual and cultural identities enrich his prayer life? How did his commitment to God, understood through his Lakota and Catholic communities, shape his understanding of how to be in the world? To fully understand the depth of Black Elk’s life-long spiritual quest requires a deep appreciation of his life story. He witnessed devastation on the battlefields of Little Bighorn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, but also extravagance while performing for Queen Victoria as a member of “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show. Widowed by his first wife, he remarried and raised eight children. Black Elk’s spiritual visions granted him wisdom and healing insight beginning in his childhood, but he grew progressively physically blind in his adult years. These stories, and countless more, offer insight into this extraordinary man whose cause for canonization is now underway at the Vatican.
Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Picador, 2018), 34. 4. Quoted in Fraser , Prairie Fires , 56. 5. Jackson, Black Elk, 30. 6. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 8. 7."
Home in America
Americans encounter their homes in ways comforting and haunting: as an imagined refuge or a place of mastery and domination, a destination or a place to escape. Drawing on literature, personal experience, and the histories of slavery, incarceration, and homesteading, Thomas Dumm offers a meditation on the richness and poverty of the idea of home.
Laura and Rose's relationship was complex and in many ways unhappy. A thorough examination of it may be found in the most comprehensive of the biographies of Wilder , Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls ..."
Gendered Ecologies
Gendered Ecologies considers the value of interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman species, and inanimate objects, featuring observations by women writers as recorded in texts. The edition presents a case for transnational women writers, participating in the discourse of natural philosophy from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.
Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires : The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder ( New York : Metropolitan , 2017 ) , 48 . Yi - Fu Tuan , Space and Place : The Perspective of Experience ( St. Paul , MN : University of Minnesota ..."
Conservatives and the Constitution
Recovers a contested, evolving tradition of conservative constitutional argument that shaped the past and is bidding to make the future.
See Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017). See also Jennifer Burns, “The Three 'Furies' of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand,” ..."
The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2019
Get thousands of fully searchable facts at your fingertips with this essential resource. The World Almanac® and Book of Facts is America's top-selling reference book of all time, with more than 82 million copies sold. For more than 150 years, this compendium of information has been the authoritative source for all your entertainment, reference, and learning needs. The 2019 edition of The World Almanac reviews the events of 2018 and will be your go-to source for questions on any topic in the upcoming year. Praised as a "treasure trove of political, economic, scientific and educational statistics and information" by The Wall Street Journal, The World Almanac and Book of Facts will answer all of your trivia needs on demand—from history and sports to geography, pop culture, and much more. Features include: The World at a Glance: This annual feature of The World Almanac provides a quick look at the surprising stats and curious facts that define the changing world and includes a sneak peek at upcoming milestone celebrity birthdays in 2019. Statistical Spotlight: A popular new feature highlights statistics relevant to the biggest stories of the year. These data visualizations provide important context and new perspectives to give readers a fresh angle on important issues. This year’s statistics will spotlight immigration, refugees, and asylum claims; the rising number and historic cost of natural disasters; and the nationwide opioid epidemic. 2018 Election Results: The World Almanac provides a comprehensive look at the entire 2018 election process, including complete Election Day results for House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. World Almanac Editors' Picks: Senior Moments: With leading athletes like Tom Brady and Serena Williams approaching middle age while still at the top of their game, The World Almanac editors look at the sports world’s most memorable achievements by aging athletes. The Year in Review: The World Almanac takes a look back at 2018 while providing all the information you'll need in 2019. 2018—Top 10 News Topics: The editors of The World Almanac list the top stories that held the world's attention in 2018, covering the U.S. Supreme Court nomination process, historic negotiations with North Korea, a year of #MeToo developments, and much more. 2018—Year in Sports: Hundreds of pages of trivia and statistics that are essential for any sports fan, featuring complete coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, World Cup men's soccer, the World Series, improved MLB player stats, and much more. 2018—Year in Pictures: Striking full-color images from around the world in 2018, covering news, entertainment, science, and sports. 2018—Offbeat News Stories: The World Almanac editors select some of the most unusual news stories of the year, from the parade commemorating a team’s winless NFL season to the “bananas” lawsuit over a Halloween costume. World Almanac Editors' Picks: Time Capsule: The World Almanac lists the items that most came to symbolize the year 2018, from news and sports to pop culture. Other New Highlights: Brand-new statistics on crime rates for all major U.S. cities, U.S. trade and immigration policies, 2018 tax cuts, DACA recipients, mobile app and tech usage, student loan debt, income inequality, and much more.
Pulitzer Prizes in Letters, 1918-2018 Other Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2018: Biography/autobiography: Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder . History (U.S.): Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of an ..."
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.
Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 224. Mrs. AJ. Wilder, “The Small Farm Home,” Missouri State Board of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1911, 255, 253. Laura ..."
Empire's Nursery
How the West was fun -- Serialized Impreialism -- Empire's amateurs -- Internationalist impulses -- Dollar diplomacy for the price of a few nickels -- Comic book cold war.
Crucial to my thinking here have been Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American ... 1987); and Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: ..."
Nuclear Country
Both North Dakota and South Dakota have long been among the most reliably Republican states in the nation: in the past century, voters have only chosen two Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, and in 2016 both states preferred Donald Trump by over thirty points. Yet in the decades before World War II, the people of the Northern Plains were not universally politically conservative. Instead, many Dakotans, including Republicans, supported experiments in agrarian democracy that incorporated ideas from populism and progressivism to socialism and communism and fought against "bigness" in all its forms, including "bonanza" farms, out-of-state railroads, corporations, banks, corrupt political parties, and distant federal bureaucracies—but also, surprisingly, the culture of militarism and the expansion of American military power abroad. In Nuclear Country, Catherine McNicol Stock explores the question of why, between 1968 and 1992, most voters in the Dakotas abandoned their distinctive ideological heritage and came to embrace the conservatism of the New Right. Stock focuses on how this transformation coincided with the coming of the military and national security states to the countryside via the placement of military bases and nuclear missile silos on the Northern Plains. This militarization influenced regional political culture by reinforcing or re-contextualizing long-standing local ideas and practices, particularly when the people of the plains found that they shared culturally conservative values with the military. After adopting the first two planks of the New Right—national defense and conservative social ideas—Dakotans endorsed the third plank of New Right ideology, fiscal conservativism. Ultimately, Stock contends that militarization and nuclearization were the historical developments most essential to the creation of the rural New Right throughout the United States, and that their impact can best be seen in this often-overlooked region's history.
See Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Holt, 2017), 164–67. For a more complete discussion of Garland's radical politics in the 1880s and 1890s, see Donald Pizer, ed., ..."
