Hi, we’re Cameron Bierkan, Laura B. Downs, Danielle Howard, and Shannon Keene! This website is dedicated to the history of the pinball machine. It was created as a class project for Dr. McClurken’s History of American Technology and Culture at the University of Mary Washington. Our class focuses on the evolution of American technology and its impact on American culture and society, and vice versa.
We studied the evolution of the pinball machine in the context of the class and have gathered our research and analysis on this website. Throughout our research, we realized that not many scholars have written about the pinball machine. As such, we have done our best to use as many scholarly sources as possible, however at times we have had to rely on less-scholarly sources. We have done our best to point our less-scholarly sources, so that you may be aware. We hope you enjoy learning all about the pinball machine!
For even more information about pinball machines, arcades, and video games that may not have been mentioned on our website, we encourage you to check out one of our earlier assignments for this class: our Annotated Bibliography!