What is "Marketing," really? What topics should marketing academics be pursuing, and toward what ends? Are we on the right track today? What has happened to more aggregated marketing perspectives beyond a focus on the individual firm or consumer household? These were the sorts of questions that stimulated an examination of the body of thought in academic marketing over the past 100 years. Characterizing the evolution across this time, we've identified four predominant eras in which distinctly different paradigms and/or priorities have held center stage. Examination of this history, and the forces that have created it, has provided us with a number of interesting lessons about marketing academia, plus challenging questions for consideration by thinkers in the field.