What Little House on the Prairie Taught My Students About Westward Expansion

My UConn dual-enrollment U.S. History students are studying Westward Expansion now, and this week we did something I wasn't sure would land: we watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie, as part of our unit on homesteading.

This is a show from the 1970s about people living in the 1870s, and I half expected eleventh graders to find it slow, dated, maybe even a little cheesy. Instead, I think they found it delightful. They leaned in during the Ingalls and Oleson family scenes.

An interesting moment. During a scene between Charles Ingalls and his daughters, a student said his lines sounded cliché. I paused the episode and told them it was worth knowing that the cast filmed together for over a decade and, by most accounts, became a real family, on set and off. Michael Landon, who played Charles, was at the center of that. It was a small reminder that what read as cliché may actually have been genuine, a real closeness between people, not just a performance of one.

But the real learning didn't happen just from watching. It's happening now, as they write about it.

Their assignment asks them to look closely at the differences between the Ingalls and Oleson families: money, clothing, possessions, work, social status, and what those differences tell us about who thrived and who struggled during westward settlement. It asks them to notice the work women and children were doing on screen, and what that reveals about family life on the frontier. And it asks them to weigh what the episode suggests about the opportunities the West offered against what it leaves out about the difficulties.

Then there's the question I actually care about most: this show was made a hundred years after the events it depicts, so what in it can they trust, and what needs to be checked against other evidence before they treat it as true?

That question is the heart of the matter, whether it's a 1970s TV drama or Holocaust testimony footage. A film is never a neutral window into the past. Someone chose the camera angle, the music, the costumes, the dialogue, what to dramatize and what to leave out. This means for historians, including eleventh-grade historians, the job is to ask who made this, when, and why, and what it would take to verify what we're seeing.

Students don't always get the chance to practice that kind of close, skeptical, curious attention. They're used to media washing over them. Watching this episode and now writing their way through it question by question, is giving them something sturdier: a habit of mind they can carry into the next film, the next source, the next claim someone makes about the past.