I’m often asked about my education and experience. To be certain, I have navigated an unusual career path that started as a teenager working an ordinary retail job in a smallish chain of local grocery stores. Ringing up hundreds of soup cans and cereal boxes a day in a tiny checkout station or corralling shopping carriages in a slushy parking lot on a 35 degree November evening was a far cry from the academic world of literature discussions and history research projects I hoped to lead someday while working at a picturesque but ordinary campus nestled somewhere in the forested foothills. It was also completely unrelated to my other career fantasy, one that would find me scouring archives and analyzing textiles in the pursuit of better understanding the individual and collective past that had fascinated me from the time I was about 11 years old. But I needed that job, and I needed a lot of time to get through a bachelor’s degree before I could start putting the other pieces in place, and sometimes the job precluded the degree and the degree requirements made it hard to change jobs in the ways recommended by so many professionals in the fields I desperately wanted to enter.

Indeed, for a long time it felt as if I’d never begin the career(s) I knew I was destined to have…someday.

So how did I get here?

Like I said…it started when I was eleven. Fifth grade, to be exact. Old Sturbridge Village. Soon to be one of my favorite haunts.

On a memorable field trip while in elementary school, I encountered the idea that a person could build an occupation teaching about the past by helping others make connections with everyday objects. We had the great good fortune that year to head out on a one-day journey to a renown living history museum 100 miles from our school. There, I found we were in a village that was at once familiar and completely foreign to anything I had experienced prior. We were surrounded by antique buildings–houses, barns, mills, outhouses, stores, trade shops, even a bank(!), all filled with original and reproduction furniture, tools, and household goods of the era we were “visiting.” We were greeted by dozens of historians, costumed as if we had stepped back in time to the 19th century. I wondered how someone could be so lucky as to work in such a wondrous place, and what one had to do to get there. In one of the stores, which didn’t have any souvenirs for us to buy, but was itself an exhibit and we were told had been relocated from another town in New England, an interpreter illustrated the concept of “working in the past” (as I termed it in those days) with his thorough reply to my question, “Did people back then brush their teeth?” He pointed out a bone-handled toothbrush displayed within a case, and, to our group’s astonishment, drew a key from his pocket and unlocked the case, removing the toothbrush for all of us to see! As he did so, he discussed precursors to modern toothpaste and answered other questions about how people in the past took care of personal hygiene. It was a simple interaction, but in that moment I understood every object has a story, and a spark was lit. A career in public history and museums became my life’s objective. 

The road to fulfill this ambition has been one “less traveled by” (apologies to Frost), but from my earliest employment, I have worked with the public, starting with several years at the grocery store. My leadership experience began with training and orientation duties in customer service. Over the next few years, subsequent roles found me taking on new management responsibilities. I was still in corporate retail, often working within or adjacent to tourist destinations. As it was necessary to work more than full-time while I pursued a bachelor’s degree, I juggled retail management positions and courses at Plymouth State University (Plymouth, NH) when money and schedules allowed. Not satisfied with routine, I sought opportunities for challenge and cross-trained among departments while learning about the companies and products I represented. In time, I mastered leadership roles such as Sales Manager and Store Manager with teams ranging from four to nearly 100 staff. I became particularly adept with profit/loss and data analysis; financial audit and inventory; and recruiting, scheduling, and coaching. I developed a keen ability to “read the room” and learned how to mitigate customer complaints or resolve conflicts among staff. I’ve always prided myself on the ability to turn a negative situation into a positive, such as providing momentarily dissatisfied customers with such a level of service that they became repeat customers who sought my advice for selecting products or finding sources in the local area for items and services my employer didn’t offer. I grew my capacity to recruit and train new hires who have strong potential for success and frequently exceed expectations. My ability to analyze data and understand potential threats to the organization’s success as well as hazards to the staff, visitors, and physical plant brought opportunities to revise or create sound, realistic policies while mitigating potential liabilities. Before I knew it, I was a professional corporate customer service manager, but something important was missing: Purpose.

For that reason, I became dissatisfied with the career path I was on, and determined to transition out of the retail environment by figuring out how to transfer the skills I had built thus far into the nonprofit museum sphere. Shortly after completing my degree, I left the corporate world to work within museums and history. It was in the middle of the Great Recession, however, and let’s just say the timing was…not good. After numerous rejections, and far too many offers to be a clerk in a gift shop at minimum wage, it became clear that more education would be necessary to bridge the gap between my understanding of corporate and nonprofit sectors, and I knew it was time to change tactics. I was eager to find a path to transition my organizational management skills to history museum management, and I really wanted to have a purpose-driven project that used my ever-increasing knowlege of American history that was fueled by an insatiable habit of reading obscure monographs and falling into long conversations with docents almost every time I visited a museum (which was almost weekly, by then).

To that end, I revisited a topic that had held my historical interest since childhood; this time, I made a deliberate choice to re-read dozens of books I had first encountered as a teenager, digging in the stacks at our local library, concerning Westward Migration and often consisting of memoirs, diaries, or letters documenting people’s experiences on the Oregon Trail or attempting to secure a plot of land via the 1862 Homestead Act. I looked to the literature that had sustained me as a child, and built a solo public history business, Meet Laura Ingalls Wilder, by creating a portfolio of educational living history and guided discussion programs on a foundation of independent research and artifact exploration. I collected relevant antiques and reproduction items to illustrate my talking points, and found a dressmaker who could build a modest wardrobe to reflect the needs, lifestyle, and preferences of the not-yet-famous farm woman who was scraping out an existence with her husband and daughter in the American Midwest in the 1890s. I then self-marketed my work to the eleven museums devoted to the often-mythologized children’s author as well as dozens of other museums, libraries, and educational organizations across the U.S.

These presentations were in first-person. That is, I presented as if I was Mrs. Wilder herself, addressing the audience directly, introducing myself and establishing the year in which the “event” of the day was taking place, thus setting the precedent that this was a visit, a conversation, with a person from the past. I’d ask the audience questions, seeking their engagement to learn what they most wanted to know about Wilder’s life and experiences, and answer by telling anecdotes from her real life (not the storybook nor tv versions) and contextualizing the information with the events, people, places, economics, politics, geography, objects, inventions, and philosophies that would have been familiar to Wilder in the moment at hand. These presentations always encompass contextual study of the regions, cultures, and socioeconomic circumstances Wilder functioned within, and have proved quite popular, especially at libraries around the U.S. where folks of a certain age had grown up reading the Little House series of books.

Over time I decided to recast my work to better feature wider themes of history, reflected by shifting some presentations to a new branding, Laura Ingalls Wilder in Context. Under either name, program content is corroborated by primary source documentation and in-depth investigation of the motivations behind the writing and publishing of the novels which brought about Wilder’s fame.

The interactive programs I present never shy from harsh truths of racism, exclusion, and colonization that are often brushed aside when Westward Expansion and related topics are presented by others in museums and media. Rather, these are frank conversations, intended to root out and correct the historical mythology and disinformation many of us learned as children. Audience response has been overwhelmingly positive, and that response encourages me to continue seeking opportunities to expand my knowledge and experience working with primary sources to uncover and interpret any history I work with in broader, more inclusive, and more accurate context while being sensitive to the presentation of disturbing content. In that way, I am constantly learning new connections between the past and the present, and new ways to interpret and share those connections with audiences of any age and groups of any size.

Leading with compassion, I have continuously challenged myself to help audiences draw relevant connections between the past and the present on any topic we explore. Building upon the sometimes painful lessons learned throughout my public history work, I bring this breadth of experience to every interaction with museum visitors, staff, volunteers, and supporters.

So…what else have I done?

Concurrent with my independent public history work and living history presentation tours, I have held paid and volunteer positions at several nonprofits. Along the way, I earned a master’s degree at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, where I graduated on the Dean’s List. That course of study featured museums and nonprofit management, with a focus of inclusion that highlights physical, intellectual, social, and economic access.

Another highlight: I am particularly proud of my achievements as a volunteer with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA). I began as a committee member in 2012 and advanced to Merchandise Chair in 2014. In 2016 I was asked to join LIWLRA’s Executive Board and served on multiple committees, including Communications, Finance, and Nominations. I became Conference Co-Chair in 2018, spearheading budget creation, volunteer recruitment, and academic conference coordination. In all, I held key roles in the production of five consecutive LIWLRA conferences. Throughout this time, I became increasingly aware of a troubling propensity in many Wilder enthusiasts to deny or downplay the racist content of her writings. This inspired me to take up a long-term project of further contextualizing the “Little House” novels and interpretations to build an inclusive narrative that corrects historical exclusion and dismantles the dehumanization of Black and Indigenous people that occurs in the author’s work. The study manifested my Capstone project, “Expanding the Narrative: A Path to Decolonization and Inclusion at Almanzo Wilder Farm,” which in turn resulted in that volunteer-led museum to request my services as a consultant. By the completion of my A.L.M. in 2019, I had presented over 250 Meet Laura Ingalls Wilder programs in nine states. Shortly after, I began hosting Laura Ingalls Wilder in Context study sessions, and was interviewed for the PBS American Masters production, Laura Ingalls Wilder: From Prairie to Page (2020). 

So what’s happened since?

Quite a lot! Stay tuned to find out…
~M