This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games.

As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store, it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the important place that department stores held in small towns all around the country.

Vicki Howard has already written on the history of the wedding industry. Now she and Al Zambone talk about the department store, how they began, what they offered people that hadn't existed before, and how they were undone by the same forces that created them. Zambone gets a little autobiographical, too, but please forgive him. Enjoy.

For Further Reading

Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition

Michael J. Lisicky, Wanamaker's: Meet Me at the Eagle

For your late-night browsing pleasure: The Department Store Museum

This week on Historically Thinking we continue our occasional series on games and history education. Following our conversation with Mark Carnes, we dig a little deeper into the philosophy of educational games with Kellian Adams. She's the Founder and Mastermind of Green Door Labs, which creates "educational game design on demand!"

She and Al Zambone discuss why games are both composed of both arbitrary rules and reality, how that makes them a lot like life, and why Kellian hates, hates, hates the word "gamification." (We promise never to use it in conversation, ever again. Honest.)

[Sorry for the delay in posting!]

For Further Reading

The Blog of Green Door Labs

This week on Historically Thinking we continue our occasional series on games and history education. Following our conversation with Mark Carnes, we dig a little deeper into the philosophy of educational games with Kellian Adams. She’s the Founder and Mastermind of Green Door Labs, which creates “educational game design on demand!” She and Al Zambone discuss […]

In his book Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, Andrew Ferguson observed that for parents the entire ordeal of college admissions combines most of the things that are important to them: “our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children.” As […]

In his book Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, Andrew Ferguson observed that for parents the entire ordeal of college admissions combines most of the things that are important to them: "our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children." As kids these say, sometimes in college essays, true dat.

Given that summer is now for many not a time of vacation but of campus tours, we thought that Historically Thinking might provide a public service for our listeners, or anyone else interested in the soft, dark underbelly of higher education.

The guest today is Mark Salisbury, Assistant Dean and Director of Assessment and Institutional Research at Augustana College. He and Al Zambone work backwards from where graduates of Augustana go and do–as opposed to what they imagined they would go and do–and how that ought to influence what prospective undergraduates should think about when they evaluate colleges. They take an enjoyable amount of time trashing the old US News and World Report poll, and explain why the most important poll of higher education is one you've never heard of, and why it sounds like the nickname of the Loch Ness Monster. At last: news you can use!

For Further Reading

David Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, How College Works

Tim Clydesdale, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School

Andrew Ferguson, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Son into College

NSSE: The National Survey of Student Engagement

Are games important? They're certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft's video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It's not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone books.

But are they useful? Of what practical value could they be for...well, teaching history?

Today is the first of a three part series on games and historical thinking. Al Zambone speaks with Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Columbia University, the originator of a pedagogy known as "Reacting to the Past", and author of Minds on Fire: How Immersive Games Transform College. They discuss college as professors like to think it is, and as it really is, and how Carnes sees immersive games as a way of bridging that rather large gap.

For Further Reading:

William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities

Mark Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role Immersion Games Transform College

Reacting to the Past–the official mega-site of the Reacting Consortium. Text, videos, and links to games in progress.

The Reacting to the Past Series at W.W. Norton

Are games important? They’re certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft’s video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It’s not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone […]

Here on the Upper Mississippi it's May, which means winter is just about over; people are creeping outside and beginning to put things on the grill; and the redolent smoke is floating through the late evening, a sign and seal of the approach of summer. Sometimes these nice Midwestern folk call what they're doing barbecue; and while they're good people, that "just ain't right." Barbecue is ... well, What Barbecue Is happens to be the subject of this podcast.

Once again, the eminence grease of Southern Sociology and Self-Understanding, John Shelton Reed, joins Al Zambone, this time to talk about North Carolina barbecue, the subject of a book he recently coauthored with Dale Volberg Reed and William McKinney. Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue is not only a history and sociology of North Carolina barbecue; it's not only a set of interviews with some of the foremost practitioners of the art; it's also got recipes and instructions on how to build your own barbecue pit so that you can cook a whole hog.

We don't want to brag, but, we have to say it: this is our most delicious podcast yet. And since Reed will soon be coming out with a book surveying the rest of the Southern barbecue scene, he's sure to be on Historically Thinking again.

For Further Reading and Eating

John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney, Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue 

Reed thinks this review of his book by Bill Kauffman got what the book is all about.

Allen & Son Bar-B-Q–they don't have a website, but they have a Yelp page full of happy customers. Don't even bother to read it. Just go eat there, OK?

In Episode 10 of Historically Thinking, Al Zambone talked with Gareth Glover about the Battle of Waterloo, the final battle of that period of conflict known as the "Napoleonic Wars" (and whose bicentennial occurs on June 18th, 2015). This week the guest on Historically Thinking is Alex Mikaberidze, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mikaberidze has written prolifically on the wars that engulfed Europe between 1793 and 1815, the "Revolutionary Wars" (1792-1802) and the "Napoleonic Wars" (1803-1815. But he's now focusing his research on the consequences (and the battlefields) of those wars outside of Europe–in the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, and in South Asia. So join us today as we further observe other end of a tumultuous era, and gallop along with us on a breathless world tour that takes us far away from the fields of Waterloo.

The guest this week on Historically Thinking is Jon Lauck. He’s the author of The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, which is several things at once: a brief illustration of the importance of the Midwest to both American and World History; the history of the concept of midwestern history; and a manifesto […]