Jem’s World
It’s easy for fans of Little House on the Prairie to imagine that we know “what it was like back then.” Primitive, harsh conditions, dependency on the land and your neighbors for your very survival.
- The Benz Patent Motorwagen was built in 1885.
The truth is, though, that while Ma Ingalls and later Jem Perkins were baking in cook stoves and pounding laundry on rocks, the Industrial Revolution was well on its way to transforming the world out of the agrarian lifestyle. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the world before computers took over, then you remember a world not so very different from the one that was evolving under Jem’s feet. Our cars were shinier and looked less like bicycles.
We had television. And, of course, our clothes were much uglier (first the seventies, with those granny-square vests and wide lapels; then the eighties with parachute pants, fingerless gloves and shoulder pads large enough to sleep on). But overall, it wasn’t so different.
- Induction Coil. This one’s mine . . . get your own.
At any rate, as Jem lounged with complacent dissatisfaction at a tea party in St. Paul, Coca-Cola had just been invented (by a pharmacist). William Stanley Jr. had just patented the induction coil (Whoooo! Let’s hear it for the induction coil! All RIGHT! No. . . I have no idea either. But it must be important — wiki listed it.)
- New — Celebrity Prairie Diet!
Jem might have read Good Housekeeping or the Ladies Home Journal in her leisure time (and did she have any other kind of time?).
While living in the city, she might have heard songs like the ones on the video below. Only one of these, Johnny Get Your Gun, was written during the time span of Whither, but the others emerged in the couple of decades that followed. Jem might have heard them all, eventually over a scratchy radio broadcast while working in her frame-house kitchen on her Nebraska farm.
And for the more high brow, Brahms wrote this in 1886:
Which is apparently the same song as this:
… which proves once and for all that “cool” existed long before we actually employed the word in the seventies.
