Jul 20, 2026 · 13 min · 8 segments
Episode 195 Little Town on the Prairie ch. 21 "The Madcap Days". Join us this week as we discuss "Lost between sunrise and sunset...", minstrelsy on the prairie, "Skidmore Guard", the history of…
This is probably the chapter other than the chapter in By the Shores of Silver Lake where they're describing how they make the railway.
And so I just want to, before I start the chapter, talk about my level of expertise.
What right do I have to speak on this fraught topic? Um, it's part of the books and I've been going chapter by chapter.
I've tackled every subject head on so far, and this isn't going to be any different.
You have to know that there is a cringe factor that when we talk about it, there's still this kind of, uh, why are we talking about this? And one writer I consulted referred to this as the uh-oh pages, the less than desirable pages in Laura Ingalls Wilder's work.
Um, But what it boils down to is a complex, contradictory history, the history of minstrelsy on the prairie.
I learned some, but there's a lot of nuances to this, and I'm not going to post my opinion on it.
I'm just going to give the facts as I know them, and I'm not going to weigh in one way or another from here on out.
This is probably the chapter other than the chapter in By the Shores of Silver Lake where they're describing how they make the railway.
And so I just want to, before I start the chapter, talk about my level of expertise.
What right do I have to speak on this fraught topic? Um, it's part of the books and I've been going chapter by chapter.
I've tackled every subject head on so far, and this isn't going to be any different.
You have to know that there is a cringe factor that when we talk about it, there's still this kind of, uh, why are we talking about this? And one writer I consulted referred to this as the uh-oh pages, the less than desirable pages in Laura Ingalls Wilder's work.
Um, But what it boils down to is a complex, contradictory history, the history of minstrelsy on the prairie.
I learned some, but there's a lot of nuances to this, and I'm not going to post my opinion on it.
I'm just going to give the facts as I know them, and I'm not going to weigh in one way or another from here on out.
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