Imagine justifying a trip to your favorite designer store as critical for college credits. Well, if you're lucky enough to be attending Yale University's history course, Shops and Shopping, such an excursion is required research. And it's fascinating stuff.

Co-taught by professors Jay Gitlin and Sandy Isenstadt, the full-semester course focuses on the history of America's popular pastime. Of the more than 80 students that signed up for the course one recent semester, only 15 were accepted. One shopaholic student didn't want to tell her parents she was taking a course on shopping so she made up another name for it‚The History of American Consumerism. But, of course, this is Yale, so the seminar isn't about getting a bargain, it's a historical perspective, an intellectual story.

The seminar's popularity also results from the comic bantering between Gitlin and Isenstadt. Students often compare them to Tom and Ray on NPRs ‚Car Talk.‚ A roundtable discourse on the evolution of cereal advertising might end with a riff between the two on favorite brands. "The topic of shopping is not central to either of us, and I think that's why we have fun doing it," explains Isenstadt, an assistant professor of modern architecture. "We are also opposites. Jay loves to shop, and I have a very troubled time with shopping. Jay would find it a failure if he left a shop without finding something, while I would consider that a success."

"I love shopping," says Gitlin, a scholar of the American West, who also teaches a course in the suburbanization of America. "Especially when there's a change of pace, a sense of texture. I prefer local or ethnic shops, with the variety of products, how they're displayed and packaged. I can remember going to Canada for the first time and marveling over the candy section."

Every once in a while, Isenstadt admits, he finds himself surrendering to shopping. "I'm drawn to stores that generate a sense of wonder. Then I just abandon myself to the spectacle. I love to look at all the stuff, it‚s such a cross-section of America," he says. "Shopping is pervasive; it is the activity that defines the way in which we acquire just about every material object we possess. And there really hasn't been a book yet that has stressed what we call the spatial infrastructure of shopping; how shops affect communities and cities. There's plenty of books covering the history of consumer culture and shopping, but not in such physical and urban terms," explains Isenstadt. Perhaps that's why the two professors are co-writing a book tentatively called The Rise and Fall of Modern Shopping.

In the seminar, students turn first to the early 16th century. "We look at markets and fairs, at invention of the shop itself," says Isenstadt. "We look at the rise of consumer culture, but we also study arcades and frontier trading posts." The advent of the department store in the early 19th century created for the first time safe public locations for women to gather, he notes. With the development of Main Street, sidewalks turned into gathering spaces. Then shopping malls transitioned into public spaces as well. Small towns countered by reinventing themselves as shopping and gallery destinations. Even gambling casinos added family-friendly shopping arcades to boost business.

"We look at big-box shopping and then ultimately, Internet shopping," Isenstadt concludes. In fact, "once we stop having physical places to shop, you've released the boundaries of shopping beyond a fixed location," Gitlin notes. "Then everything in the universe becomes a consumer experience." Yes, but can it ever replace Macy's?