In early June, we embarked on a History Chicks Field Trip to Chicago! It was five days of learning, exploring, history, friendship…and food. We traveled paths of former subjects, saw places where some had worked, stayed in a hotel owned by one, and crammed as many museums (and their gift shops) as possible into our time.
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Bertha Palmer
Bertha Palmer wore a lot of hats: Chicago socialite, patron of the arts, real-estate magnate, and all-around Gilded Age powerhouse. Her leadership of the Women’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition drew praise from all over the world. (and criticism, too!) We’ll also tell you about her influence on Impressionist art in America, and her surprising third act as a Sarasota land developer.
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Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland did not have the longest reign, nor was she a dynamic ruler full of personality and dazzle, but she was better than that. She quietly had a long and loving marriage, suffered the emotional toll of 17 pregnancies and the deaths of the only three children that survived infancy, and instituted changes that are still relevant today. She was a popular and thoughtful monarch who brought stability to a country that had seen more than its share of chaos, and she did that despite England’s involvement in a war that lasted nearly the entirety of her reign.
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We finish up our do-over coverage of the (very long) life of Laura Ingalls Wilder! This episode covers the years when she was writing her iconic Little House series- from conception within the pages of a memoir, to the business of writing the books, to the many years it took her to write the series. And we talk about the involvement of her daughter, the prolific writer Rose Wilder Lane, in the creation of the books.
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