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Meeting Laura

Traveling program brings Laura Ingalls Wilder fans an interactive

perspective on her real-life experiences

Area Laura Ingalls Wilder fans will get the whole pint – instead of just a “Half Pint” this month.

Laura will be fleshed out in the form of historian Melanie Stringer who will portray her in a series of area presentations.

Stringer will present her living history programs at library and school locations throughout a nine-county area. She will tell stories of life on the prairie in 1896 in her “Meet Laura” program. Stringer portrays Laura as an adult, living with her husband Almanzo and their daughter, Rose, in the outskirts of Mansfield, Missouri, where they had been building up their farm.

Times were tough for the family and they struggled financially.

At the time that Stringer has focused on, Laura was an ordinary woman – she didn’t get published until she was 65 years old, Stringer said. Rose, the daughter of Laura and Almanzo, was the more well known of the two prior to the “Little House” books’ publication because of her work as a journalist and political theorist.

So often, Stringer said, history is written about the “wealthy, the movers and shakers, more than ordinary people.”

The program also includes a hands-on artifact display of everyday items familiar and necessary to Laura during this era. Springer, a historian who has studied American history, women’s history and Laura Ingalls Wilder for more than 20 years, encourages participation from her audiences and welcomes questions.

For Stringer, studying history is an exciting endeavor and making history come alive is a lot of fun.

“Some people think history is boring,” she said. “But it’s how we’re taught that can be boring – if all we’re doing is learning facts and figures and dates.”

If Stringer sees someone in the audience who looks disengaged, such as “a teenager and father who were dragged in, I try to incorporate information that they can relate to that would keep them interested.”

Her interest in history began early, sparked when she learned to read with her father using Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series of books. A later visit with her classmates to a living history museum in Sturbridge, Mass., cemented her fascination with history. She particularly enjoyed the stores that carried items on the shelves including a boar bristle toothbrush with bone handles, which answered her question of what people in Laura’s time brushed their teeth with.

“I was blown away by the experience,” she said. “You get an idea of what it would be like to live in that time period.”

Stringer, who lives in Union, New Hampshire, has a bachelor’s in American literature and history from Plymouth State University and is a charter member of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association.

Since Stringer invites audience members to ask questions of Laura, she has taken it upon herself to be familiar with not only Laura and her family, but “what news stories she would have read, what were the politics of the day. I have to know the character inside and backward.”

She is careful to only relate factual information.

“It has to be documented somewhere,” she said.

The program is being funded through the State’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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