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Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote a column titled "Rose Lane Says" from 1942 to 1945 for the
Pittsburgh Courier, the largest circulating African American newspaper of the era. Her columns took on issues of race, equality, and liberty, offering deep analyses of themes also explored in her 1943 book,
The Discovery of Freedom. The
Pittsburgh Courier's vast circulation brought Lane's understanding of individual liberty to hundreds of thousands of readers. While Lane's writings and role as a collaborator on her mother's
Little House books have garnered substantial attention of late, her columns for the
Pittsburgh Courier, as well as her broader comments about and relationships with African Americans and civil rights, have not received their due. Her background in the rural Midwest was crucial in influencing the content of her individualist antiracism. Lane's writings at the
Courier represented the most ambitious effort of any author during this period to promote laissez faire ideas to a black audience. Through her columns, Lane creatively linked her philosophical beliefs to issues of concern to her readers, including segregation, civil disobedience, entrepreneurship, and the struggle for liberty both overseas and at home.
In
Rose Lane Says, editors David T. Beito and Marcus Witcher provide annotations and an excellent introduction to Lane's columns, which until now have been next to impossible to locate. This volume includes eighty-four columns, in print for the first time since their original runs in the 1940s.
A propos de l'auteur
David T. Beito is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Alabama and a Senior Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. His academic research has covered a wide range of topics in American history including civil rights, tax revolts, civil liberties, the nongovernmental provision of infrastructure, and mutual aid. His most recent book is
The New Deal's War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2023).
Marcus Witcher is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Economic History at West Virginia University where he also serves as Manager of Undergraduate Programs for the Knee Regulatory Research Center. He completed his Ph.D. in history from the University of Alabama in 2017. His first book,
Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016, was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2019. Witcher is also the co-editor of seven edited collections and has written for a diverse range of publications, including
Reason Magazine,
National Review,
Modern Age, and the
Washington Post. His most recent book,
Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America, co-authored with Rachel Ferguson, was published by Emancipation Books in 2022.
