Growing Empathy Through Historical Fiction

In the summer of 1975, I was a shy, awkward girl obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I couldn’t get enough of her stories about 19-th century settler life. Her books were my gateway into historical fiction. Wilder’s writing opened my eyes to the hardships that people experienced on the frontier. She introduced me to homesteading women who faced…