[HN Gopher] Search for the historical Laura Ingalls Wilder (2019)
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Search for the historical Laura Ingalls Wilder (2019)
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-08-20 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.montanapress.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.montanapress.net)
| stew-j wrote:
| My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD
| again currently. She is getting tired of hearing me joke,
| "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern
| California?" She read the books as a girl, but boys generally
| didn't in the '70s. Our elementary school in Kansas distributed a
| screen play for one of the episodes as part of a literacy
| program. When I went to school in New York, many people had the
| idea that we still lived like that, way out west in Kansas. One
| of the first episodes of the TV show was about a Typhus plague,
| and how the population cooperated and sacrificed to survive. My
| wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books, but I'm sure
| TV moves even more away from the reality of Laura's life.
|
| LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to
| modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. One boss I had
| was Mennonite, and his wife, after decades of growing and
| processing the family's food, started shopping in stores. She
| remarked how wonderful it was to have store bought canned food,
| which I guess is a partial explanation.
| duxup wrote:
| > LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry
| to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life.
|
| Farming is hard, the boom and bust cycle is harsh. Most early
| farms were too small in scale to survive.
|
| Not to criticize LHOP here, but generally there is a sort of
| romantic idea of a family farm that for large chunks of time
| wasn't sustainable financially no matter how hard they worked.
| thegeekpirate wrote:
| > My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on
| DVD again currently.
|
| FWIW the Blu-ray version is great, although they didn't
| remaster the audio to remove pops/hisses.
| stormdennis wrote:
| We planted our own trees 15 years ago and now, we cut, split
| and dry our own firewood, it's a lot of work, though it is an
| extra pleasure to sit in front of such a fire I can see why
| people stopped doing it.
| stew-j wrote:
| Although some of their time was freed up by not having to
| diagnose issues with CI pipelines on the cloud, or writing
| meta-manager code to tame Slurm :)
| ksaj wrote:
| > My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books
|
| Only up to a certain point. For example, everything about
| Albert. And Colonel Sanders didn't visit the town when they
| were starting up the chicken restaurant.
|
| The later the series ran, the farther they strayed from the
| books.
| paulcole wrote:
| > She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part
| of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?"
|
| Do you do this for every show/film that is set somewhere
| outside of SoCal but obviously filmed there?
| morelisp wrote:
| And every alien planet which seems to resemble Canadian
| prairie.
| ksaj wrote:
| And every NY or Chicago scene that is actually on and
| around Bay Street in Toronto.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| They didn't even film Alien on location, smh
| slillibri wrote:
| duxup wrote:
| For a big chunk of TV / film it was noticeably repetitive.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For a big chunk of TV / film it was noticeably
| repetitive.
|
| Well, there is a reason for that, and a reason why it is
| often more noticeable in older works:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_zone
| duxup wrote:
| Oh yeah there's good reason, can't take everything on the
| road, budgets and etc.
| implements wrote:
| It's hard not to if the show does it a lot - _JAG's_ 'orange
| lit' Northern Ireland episode was particularly jarring!
| paulcole wrote:
| It's actually not that hard to keep your mouth shut about
| it. It's not like anybody thinks the cast of JAG went to
| film in Belfast. Pretty annoying to watch something with
| someone who has to point out something so obvious.
|
| Just enjoy the show!
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you can't suspend my disbelief, then you've faild at
| your job. If you can't handle the criticism of your job,
| get better at your job or get a new job.
|
| As if you've never maintained someone else's code and
| didn't make any kinds of comments about how bad it was or
| anything similar. Just shut up and do your job!
| paulcole wrote:
| I don't program professionally. Just here to keep an eye
| on the tech-bros who think they're above everyone else.
| stew-j wrote:
| To be fair, I know you didn't have much context. I had to
| look up "tech bro":
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/stop-calling-everyone-tech-
| bro/
|
| Tech bro does not describe me (I agree they should have
| an eye kept on them though), I'm a 55 year old man who
| watches LHOTP on a 10 year old DVD player, has 10.5 years
| of Visual Basic programming, and wears sandals with white
| socks.
|
| Last week I had to look up "sh*tpost" and "edgelord", and
| before that "know your meme" when those were leveled at
| me. Maybe people on the Internet and social media too
| need to understand, like TV show fans, that it is NOT
| reality. It also doesn't foster the kind of wonderful,
| 20+ year marriage we've had--we are BFFs forever my wife
| and I, like Mr. and Mrs. Ingalls in some ways. I also
| reserve my right to laugh at the incongruities of the
| Internet--I have a headache from laughing so hard at it
| today, so I will spare everyone more annoyance and quit
| for a long time.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| He was just colloquializing a sweet moment with his wife.
| Didn't seem like anything to get worked up about.
| dylan604 wrote:
| if you can't make the leap of imagination to substitue
| your career path with the provided example, then...boy, I
| don't know
| paulcole wrote:
| To be fair, I really am pretty stupid.
| stew-j wrote:
| On your advice, we just agreed to watch it separate rooms
| with no discussions at supper. No more calling Mrs.
| Oleson the meanest person that ever lived, in jest, that
| is OVER (we both are guilty of this one). We are going to
| enjoy it even if it strips the all joy out of life.
|
| The actress who played Nellie said she used to get hate
| mail from fans of the show, who apparently couldn't
| distinguish her from her character. (She said IRL she was
| friends with the younger Melissa, and some of the cast
| attested to how nice she was offscreen--both from a
| special feature on one of the DVDs) Man, we aren't that
| far gone. It actually is the best part of our day,
| spending time making fun of Landon's hair.
| implements wrote:
| > It's not like anybody thinks the cast of JAG went to
| film in Belfast.
|
| Oddly enough, they did do a couple in Sydney Australia -
| that, and Aussie lawyer "Mic" (Mick, ffs!) were probably
| an attempt to sell the show in another anglophone market.
| stew-j wrote:
| Not every one, just Star Trek TOS. :)
|
| We're about even though, every time she sees a horse on
| screen she says "Why can't I ride a horse to work instead of
| driving our 20 year old Mazda?" Having lived in Kansas,
| Colorado, and Wyoming, and having mucked a few horse stalls
| in my day--I know why we 9 billion people don't still ride
| them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Not every one, just Star Trek TOS
|
| There's not that much in TOS which is distinctly SoCal,
| since even most of the planetside "outdoors" sets were
| soundstages, with matte painted backgrounds.
| theflyingelvis wrote:
| I do
| [deleted]
| j_m_b wrote:
| >"the rain follows the plow"
|
| For those who aren't familiar, this expression refers to the
| mistaken belief that if you cultivate the land with crops and you
| planted trees, this would cause a change in the local climate.
| They thought that each little homestead (farm) would convert the
| local clime to an overall wetter, more productive one.
| aj7 wrote:
| I didn't want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. I wanted to be a cat.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Fraser's book is pretty detailed and worth reading for those
| who've only gotten the version from the books or the tv show.
| It's clear that the economy was much more complex than we were
| told. It was probably impossible for any of the homesteaders like
| the Ingalls to ever make enough to live upon given the amount of
| land they were given.
| duxup wrote:
| > It's clear that the economy was much more complex than we
| were told.
|
| Isn't it always more complex than we can detail?
| adolph wrote:
| One part of me asks "Would a similar proportion of the
| population today take the same risks today?"
|
| Another asks "Were homesteaders the ones being farmed? By the
| railroads? By a government?"
| swayvil wrote:
| The pro-homesteader propaganda of the day might reveal a lot.
| Also we might look at the alternatives to homesteading.
|
| Today's crazy is yesterday's contextually-appropriate
| levelheadedness.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah hop off a boat (or not) and have nothing.... Trying
| your hand at a homestead might be a very good choice among
| other choices.
| fmajid wrote:
| Opportunity costs were lower back then.
| drewcoo wrote:
| https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-
| war/homestead-...
|
| Presumably part of the reason was to create more states
| without a history of slavery, to avoid another Civil War. And
| also at the same time, to have more settlements to control
| the natives.
|
| Lincoln said the Homestead Act was to "elevate the condition
| of men." By which the ex-Indian warrior meant "except
| Indians." Not surprisingly, it also included freed slaves,
| because moving west would be less uncomfortable than moving
| north, Lincoln having a history of that racism, too.
|
| And the railroads didn't want to give away land. They were
| busy reclaiming it via eminent domain for their own profits.
| The abuses of railroads and banks who could not properly
| insure savings turned folks like Jesse and Frank James into
| folk heroes.
| bequanna wrote:
| I think you might be projecting your modern politics onto
| the problems of the past.
|
| I don't think that everything bad in the 1800's was caused
| by racism and greedy corporations.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Were homesteaders the ones being farmed?
|
| It wasn't the only political or economic goal, but a pretty
| explicit purpose of the Homestead Acts was to make it
| impossible for Native Americans to return to their historical
| territories.
| le-mark wrote:
| Some of those small towns in Kansas will give you a house if
| you agree to live there for a few years. Homesteading is
| still a thing in that small way at least.
| floren wrote:
| Over a million families took advantage of the Homestead Acts,
| which granted 160 acres to settlers. That much land was
| certainly enough to make a living on. When I looked up my
| grandparents in the 1950 census, every house on the page was
| marked as being half a mile down the road from the previous one
| --because 160 acres, a quarter section, is 1/2 mile on a side.
|
| Bad luck, family tragedy, and other factors played into the
| failure of the Wilders to succeed, but make no mistake: many
| _did_ succeed on that land.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Some succeeded. Many more failed.
|
| Maybe when gambling against nature, the odds are with the
| house.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| counterpoint - previously ruined land-owners in West Texas
| after the dust bowl, apparently turned enthusiastically to
| the small-rig Oil business, poisoned many a water table, and
| now have some of the most active fracking in the world. Lots
| of big trucks in that part of Texas showing the "success"
| colechristensen wrote:
| Likewise, I was the fifth generation born on a farm that
| started with a homestead act grant.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| The books present "Pa" as a hero, but if you look at him with
| a critical eye (as Fraser's book does), it's pretty clear the
| family's woes were largely due to him. Their original farm
| was by all accounts the best of the lot, and if they had
| stayed at the second one in Kansas they might have done OK.
| But he abandoned that one too based on (incorrect) rumors
| that the land would be confiscated, and every move they made
| afterwards drove them further and further into penury.
| moistly wrote:
| > it's pretty clear the family's woes were largely due to
| him
|
| I mean, FFS, the family ended up living in a dirt hole dug
| into a damn riverbank! Not a nice hobbit home, either:
| we're talking a raw dirt hole. Pa was bug-fuck _crazy_ and
| anyone who reads the books as an adult can see it writ
| large.
|
| Edit: whoa! No offense intended, fans of the myth, but
| again: dirt hole. That ain't the behaviour of a fully
| rational adult.
| analog31 wrote:
| Likewise the impression I formed was that Pa was impulsive
| and a bad businessman. Now, we don't know if he kept on the
| move because of something like bad debts, which would not
| be shocking or even necessarily incriminating.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Here's more about Rose's political beliefs and their influence on
| the project
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house...
| peter303 wrote:
| Rose is considered a founder of American Libertarian movement.
| People debate whether some these ideas crept into her Moms
| books which Rose heavily edited.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Elsewhere, the books minimize the role of government in the
| life of a family that sometimes did have to rely on it, as they
| took free land and benefited from state funds that paid sister
| Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa School for the Blind for
| seven years, a public subsidy the books quietly omit.
|
| Wow.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Ah, yes, the government, the rightful owner of all, ahem,
| 'unclaimed' land.
| samatman wrote:
| This is, as far as my recollections of reading the entire
| series as a preteen goes, absurd.
|
| It's called the Iowa School for the Blind. It would _never
| have occurred_ to the audience that the education wasn 't
| provided by the state. It's called the.. never mind, I said
| that already.
| kodah wrote:
| > Elsewhere, the books minimize the role of government in the
| life of a family that sometimes did have to rely on it, as they
| took free land and benefited from state funds that paid sister
| Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa School for the Blind for
| seven years, a public subsidy the books quietly omit.
|
| There was also a roller rink near where they lived. LH is a
| work of fiction. When I read the series it was advertised as
| such. I don't think it discounts the story much, because the
| real story is about Laura and how she experienced the world.
| Laura lived through quite a bit and the story was shaped to
| emphasize those things.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you want pioneer stories without any Ayn Rand sprinkled on
| top, try Willa Cather.
| sleightofmind wrote:
| It's been a long time since I read My Antonia. Loved it. If
| memory serves, though, wasn't the main male character quite
| the self-made man? Again, it's been a while. Beautiful
| picture of the harsh reality, and stark beauty of life on the
| plains.
|
| If you want Ayn Rand that makes sense, read We the Living, in
| my opinion, by far her best work. As a matter of fact, I'd
| say Ayn Rand's three major works, can be rated worst to best
| with length being the determining factor. Worst -- Atlas
| Shrugged. If ever a book needed an editor of steely resolve,
| it was that windbag of a novel -- would have been great at
| 1/2 it's length. The Fountainhead was tighter and better. But
| We the Living is the best because it is set in the world of
| her youth and makes her rah-rah cheerleading for capitalism
| and her deep hatred of communism completely relatable in
| context. The story never leaves the Soviet Union, so it's
| very different from her other work.
|
| I love capitalism, but reading Atlas Shrugged left me feeling
| like this is one hard woman. Reading We the Living left me
| feeling like now I get it -- I'd be hard, too.
| Maursault wrote:
| Even notably bad writing, even if espousing the fatally
| flawed and incomplete ideology of Objectivism, leading to
| the fatally flawed political movement of Libertarianism,
| which if practiced ultimately results in pure Socialism,
| may be ranked: bad, worse, and worst. I couldn't say
| exactly who the singular worst popular writer of the 20th
| Century was, but certainly Rand must be a strong contender.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Given the current state of affairs it looks like Ayn might
| have been ahead of her time.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Another one also related to that:
|
| https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-myth-of-american-conservatism...
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| Great article, thanks.
| sethev wrote:
| Some of this article reads like a criticism of people's second-
| hand impressions of the books. Their poverty and Pa's poor
| decisions that made it worse are right there in the books,
| they're just told from the perspective of a child who loves her
| father and doesn't know a different life.
|
| Whether the real-life Laura is like the one in the book is kind
| of interesting, I guess, but anyone who didn't pick up on how
| poor they were and how little success they had at farming from
| the books was reading them superficially.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Agreed. This article (haven't read the book) has the feel of
| yet another "ackshually."
| duxup wrote:
| I agree. I'd argue there's a lot of literary criticism that
| comes later to tell us how we should view a place and time, or
| even characters in a book. And often and the answer is "Yeah
| well if you read the book, that's in the book..."
|
| Perhaps not as explicit, but it is hard to miss, and anyone
| familiar with humanity probably can guess the rest. Most people
| know they're reading a book.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > Among them, there is evidence that Laura often exhibited a
| quick temper.
|
| > Laura hated wearing sunbonnets and yearned keenly for
| beautiful, stylish dresses.
|
| Oh no! What a monster! Cancel her NOW.
|
| > Neither Charles and Caroline Ingalls, nor Almanzo and Laura
| Wilder, could manage to make the promise of free land come true.
| Never did they ever make a living wage solely from farming.
|
| Even worse! She sold lots of innocent little girls a dream they
| could never have. The criminal.
|
| Farming is a dream. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn't.
| I'd rather have a population of dreamers than a population of
| soulless drones.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It seems like you're mischaracterizing the tone of this essay.
|
| I just read it as a thoughtfully developed history of a
| familiar subject, published in a regional lifestyle magazine,
| but you seem to be responding to it as if its some moralizing
| Twitter screed.
|
| Did I miss something?
| swayvil wrote:
| The twitter-screed is the social-media equivalent of the amp-
| hour. This power is generated, transmitted and consumed. It
| drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.
| Isamu wrote:
| >It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.
|
| Thank you for today's most quotable metaphor!
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Maybe you missed the cancel-LHOTP movement, e.g. someone else
| on the thread posted this:
|
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-
| house...
|
| a heading is "To Live the Impossible Dream." Do we find any
| sympathetic treatment of Laura in this article? Or is it
| purely debunking?
| krapp wrote:
| So you posted a low quality, snarky reply to a completely
| different article?
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| No, I posted a high-quality reply to the subtext of THIS
| article. It was pure debunking for a political end and
| didn't deserve a lengthy, objective answer.
| swatcoder wrote:
| This article strongly recommends two books be read
| together for those who want deep and multi-dimensional
| insight into the history of Wilder and LHOP, and surfaces
| some details from each while grounding it in personal
| experience, for a casual audience of middle class
| Montanans.
|
| Readers, it would seem, are expected to come out of it
| having something fresh and interesting to talk about on
| their hike or over Sunday dinner.
|
| If there's something political in your experience of it,
| that would seem to be through subjective associations of
| your own, not a subtext.
| krapp wrote:
| I think your definition of 'high-quality' differs from
| the community norm.
| [deleted]
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| I think you mean "my opinion" not "community norm" there.
| pstuart wrote:
| 'high-quality' means aligns with my worldview, right?
| sleightofmind wrote:
| An aside about the dream of farming. I'd always heard it subtly
| implied that my maternal grandfather, born 1899, and early on,
| a farmer in Minnesota, was not much of a farmer, because,
| ultimately, after 30 years or so of farming, he gave up and
| moved to California, and took a job in town.
|
| What I did not realize, and subsequently caused me to regard
| his farming skills with greater generosity, was that during the
| first fifty years of his life, the percentage of people working
| on farms went from 20% of the US population to 2%! So, even if
| one were a good farmer, there was still a very real chance of
| getting squeezed out.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Yeah, farming is hard, plus it demands luck.
|
| I'd never succeed at it, although nowadays, I'd hire a farm
| manager. That guy might keep it afloat, but then I wouldn't
| make any money off it because I'd be paying him.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I hadn't thought about Little House on the Prairie since I was
| about 7 or 8 years old, but noticed it was being run on some
| over-the-air local station recently. I don't know why, but those
| stories were _very_ popular in the mid to late 1970s. In addition
| to Little House, we had The Waltons, Grizzly Adams, and movies
| like Across The Great Divide. I don't know what the attraction
| was, but even living in the rural suburbs, it seemed like the
| shows took place a million years ago to my young mind.
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