: American Masters & Orchard House: Home of Broadcast Schedule May 20, 2020 4 & 5pm

Primary Source Analysis Tool: Generic tool to help students analyze ​ Vegas PBS broadcast programs Further Reading: Engaging all Learners with Primary Sources ​ ​ ______

May 20, 2020 @ 4:00pm Louisa May Alcott: American Masters Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, is an almost universally recognized ​ ​ name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th century Concord, is firmly established. Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and Transcendentalists, the intellectual protégé of and , Alcott was actually a free thinker, with democratic ideals and progressive values about women – a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that Alcott led, anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life not discovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned some thirty pulp fiction thrillers, with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts – a far cry from her better-known works featuring fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and impish children

May 20, 2020 @ 5:00pm Orchard House: Home of Little Women Learn more about Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. ______

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Little Women: Primary Source Sets and Teaching Guide ​ Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women tells the story of the four March girls as they ​ ​ make the transition to womanhood and struggle to conform to society’s strict ideals of femininity in thes/little-women-b midst of poverty. The story is set in 1860s Massachusetts during the Civil War and is loosely based on Alcott’s own childhood. The collection of resources here, made up of photographs, illustrations, letters, and physical objects, helps explain the era in which the March family lived and the challenges they Louisa May Alcott: American Masters & Orchard House: Home of Little Women Broadcast Schedule May 20, 2020 4 & 5pm faced, from the books they read and the clothes they wore to the struggles of war and illness.